Jury Duty and Workplace Dysfunction

I just completed jury duty. I am aware of the joke about the problem with jury trials: your fate is in the hands of 12 people who were not smart enough to get out of jury duty. I did not try to avoid it. I figured it would be interesting at least. I have never made it to a jury before. I was also quite surprised that I made it onto this jury.

I will start there. I told this story once, when I had not yet been chosen to sit on the jury. The case was about a workplace termination. I am sure my Union activities would have me quickly rejected as soon as the attorneys started questioning me. As it turns out, that didn’t happen. I was one of the last two jurors seated and we were perfunctorily questioned by the judge. I did not have to give my spiel about the word fair. I just slipped onto the jury.

Then I sat and listened and took notes for a couple of weeks. Neither side offered a compelling or convincing argument. There were several witnesses whose connection to the facts of the case was tenuous and whose testimony was more confusing to the matter than anything else. After a while I stopped taking notes when the defendant’s attorney was arguing.

There was a reason for my failure to pay attention to the defendant’s arguments. The trial hinged on the failure of a company’s HR staff and consultants to properly do their jobs. They failed to act quickly, then tried to cover their asses by offering legislated assistance they might not have been responsible to offer had they just acted quickly.

In the end the HR staff were trying to be nice to an employee who had been going through personal hardships. Add to that the major events took place while the world was shut down because of COVID. Had they quickly fired the employee they could have avoided any liability. Had they offered a leave of absence based on the employee’s actual concerns they could have avoided liability.

Instead those HR staff seemed to be in over their heads. It is easy to blame the HR staff for causing the fiasco that ensued; however, in my experience there are few HR staffs willing to make big decisions without management input. In my mind, the entire incident can be put in the hands of the executive management of the company.

Sitting and listening to repetitive descriptions of a not compelling to begin with story gets to be a drag after a while, especially after lunch. We, the jury, slogged through without incident. Once we got into deliberations things started to get interesting. I will tell you about that next time.