Giving Workers The Treatment
Page 3
The Progressive
May 24, 2001
By Peter Downs
“If you assume the doctor is concerned about your health and well-being, you’ve made a deadly assumption,” he says. They are looking for any phrase or evidence they can use against you to stereotype you as schizophrenic, paranoid, or delusional.”
"Any doctor worth his salt will find something wrong, or even make up something, and if you don't
answer one of his questions, then you are uncooperative and you can be fired for that, too."
One part of that search can involve ransacking a worker’s past medical records. Postal unionist Albanese represented one worker last year who won an arbitration ruling to return to work after he had been fired for a totally different reason. In order to return to work, he had to pass a fitness-for-duty exam. The Postal Service doctor required that he turn over all of his medical records, even to the extent of requiring that he track down doctors who had treated him as a child.
As it turns out, this worker had received psychiatric care as a teenager some thirty years before. When the company doctor discovered that, he declared the worker unfit for duty, Albanese says, in essence reversing the arbitrator’s ruling. Albanese recently took an appeal of that decision to a new arbitrator, who ruled that the Postal Service was within its rights, since there was no guarantee that the problems the employee had as a teenager would not recur.
“If something you say in counseling can he used against you thirty years later, doesn’t that destroy the whole point of counseling?” Albanese asks.
Finding the grounds to fire an employee is not the only goal of employer-mandated psychiatric exams,” says Tom Devine, local director for the Government Accountability Project. Often, another goal is to smear and discredit the employee. That, he said, is why psychiatric harassment “is unsurpassed in its ugliness.”
In Crosty’s case, a notice on the company bulletin board announced he had been expelled from the plant for psychiatric reasons. “It was very demeaning,” says Crosty. With the help of an attorney, and after he was cleared by four different psychiatrists, he got his job back, but “I was totally’ discredited as some kind a kook and wacko,” he says.
In Murtagh’s case, administrators at Emory “spread a rumor that he could be armed and dangerous, and a terrorist threat,” says Devin, whose organization has taken up Murtagh’s defense.
In November 2000, a judge put Murtagh under a gag order. By that time, he had already spent $500,000 defending himself against Emory’s allegations. Once a highly recruited research scientist from the National Institutes of Health, he acknowledged that whatever the outcome of his legal battles, “I will never get an academic job again. . . My life and dreams have been uprooted.”
Jan Gleason, assistant vice president in Emory’s office of communications, said the administration cannot comment on Murtagh’s case. She also declined to comment on what procedures the university uses to determine when a mandatory psychiatric examination is warranted, when the administration began using such exams, or how many exams it has ordered. According to an account in the Emory student newspaper; Emory Wheel, in the last three years the administrators ordered five tenured faculty, who were critics of administration policies, to undergo psychiatric examinations as a prelude to breaking their tenure and firing them.
Last year, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a new rule requiring that an employer be able to demonstrate a business necessity before subjecting an employee to a medical inquiry. One of its last acts was to issue new regulations restricting an employer’s right to dig into an employee’s medical history. Part of the patient privacy regulations published by the Department of Health and Human Services on December 28, 2000, the rule bans employer access to health information for use in hiring, firing, or making promotions without the voluntary consent of the employee. Albanese interprets that to mean an employer can’t fire you for refusing to turn over your health records.
On February 23, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, pushed back the effective date of the rule to give the Administration and Congress time to reexamine it. “We’re hoping Bush doesn’t rescind it,” says Albanese.
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