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On October 5, 1998, Norm Crosty sent a letter to the labor relations department at his plant. Crosty, for thirteen years an electrician at Ford Motor Company’s Wixom, Michigan, Assembly plant, complained that he could not do his job because so many of his bosses were taking the necessary equipment out of the plant to work on their homes or personal businesses.
The next day, the plant director of human resources invoked a Ford program for combating workplace violence to bar Crosty from the factory and ordered him to see a company paid psychiatrist or lose his job.
A little more than fourteen months later, and 725 miles away, officials at Emory University cited a similar concern about violence to justify using armed guards to escort Dr. James Murtaugh off university property when Dr. R. Wayne Alexander, chairman of the department of medicine at Emory, ordered him to see a company-selected psychiatrist or lose his job. Six weeks earlier, Murtagh, a professor of pulmonology at Emory, had filed a false claims suit against the University, alleging that it had misspent millions of dollars in federal grant money. He claimed the university diverted money from research grants in order to pay for salaries and trips for administrators and some staff. The specific allegations were sealed by order of the federal judge.
(Crosty and Murtagh don’t know each other. It is unlikely their worlds would ever intersect, but they have at least one thing in common. They both are victims of an increasingly popular employer weapon against whistleblowers: the psychiatric reprisal.
Across the United States, companies have seized upon cozy concerns about workplace violence to quash dissent. Hundreds of large corporations have hired psychiatrists and psychologists as consultants to advise them on how to weed out “threatening” employees. They say they are only responding to a 1970 directive from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration that they maintain a “safe and secure work environment. ” But by drawing the definition of “threatening” as broadly as possible. they are giving themselves a new club to bang over the heads of workers.
Maria Buffa, a former salaried employee in the personnel department at Ford World Headquarters in Dearborn Michigan, said she, too, was sent to a psychiatrist after she filed a sexual harassment complaint in February 1999 against a woman co-worker. “You think, maybe I am the problem, else why would they be sending me to a psychiatrist,” she said. The psychiatrist Ford selected, Dr. Edward Dorsey of Midwest Health Center, made a report that said the only psychiatric symptom Buffa displayed was anxiety. Dorsey's report said that the referral came from Ford’s medical department and was at least in part due to her complaints of sexual harassment. He also noted that the Ford doctor who referred Buffa cited a couple of' 'incidents’. She was seen yelling at someone, and she had shown up at a fitness center “wearing less than the usual amount of clothing for that physical activity.”
In April 1999, Buff's boss fired her "for the good of the company," she recalled being told.
In some cases, a "threatening" employee may just be an ardent union activist.
Take Nancy Schillinger. While a United Auto Workers committeewoman at Ford’s St. Paul, Minnesota, assembly plant, she repeatedly lectured her members about standing up for their contract rights. They were the union, she said, and it was up to them to make the company honor the contract. Her own union representative, committeeman Tom Laney; calls her “a real unionist.” In 1999, she returned to a job on the line to practice what she preached. Every time she saw a contract violation, she challenged it. She spent most of the time out of the plant on disciplinary layoffs. She’d file grievances challenging those as violations of the contract, and usually she won. On December 21, 1999, she was placed on medical leave to undergo a psychiatric fitness-of-duty examination, but she was not given a reason for the order, as Labor Notes first reported. Eventually, the local union’s building chairman told her the fitn ess-for-duty exam was ordered because she had so many grievances and disciplinary marks on her record.
Viewing the ordered psychiatric exam as both a fraud and a violation of the UAW-Ford collective bargaining agreement, Schillinger refused to submit to it. On February 1, 2000, she was fired. She complained to the National Labor Relations Board. The board investigator, however, concluded in his report on the matter that the company was justified in requiring a psychiatric examination given Schillinger’s “confrontational attitude and “dissident viewpoints.”
By this spring, Schillinger’s grievance contesting her firing had moved out of the hands of the local union to the international union. There, the servicing representative assigned to handle grievances from her plant withdrew it, in effect accepting her firing. Schillinger claims some local union officials who were her political adversaries were behind the whole thing and merely bumped the grievance up to the international union so that someone insulated from membership action could take the heat for quashing her grievance.
Ford communications manager Ed Miller confirms that the company does have a program against workplace violence, directed by plant human resources directors. “But one of the pieces is that we do not talk about it externally,” he says. He won’t comment on Schillinger’s case, but he does say that he doubts the veracity of Crosty’s and Buffa’s stories.
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