Comments on: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t files: Cynthia Haddad v. Wal-Mart

By: Teri

Teri — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 05:36:56 +0000

I’m sorry but how about thinking about this from a pharmacist duties perspective. Only pharmacists can fill rxs… she allowed someone who wasn’t to fill the scripts.. I would assume that this is a punishable offense in terms of keeping her license… Why didn’t she just get suspended for her actions until walmart got her license revoked… with a revoked license.. problem solved, she’s not fit to be a pharmacist… hence she can be fired. It’s absolutely shameful that gender discrimination stunts like this get through.. it makes a mockery of actual gender (and other) suits that really have merit…

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 17:41:40 +0000

Re Ted’s point about whether or not Wal-Mart has ever fired a male pharmacist for teh same offense — such questions are rarely as black-and-white as one might think. First, there is the problem of identifying a “similarly situated” employee for comparison. The law does not require an “identically situated” employee. Is it so difficult to imagine that there may have been several incidents where male pharmacists violated procedure but weren’t fired? Hardly. Each case is a unique situation, right? But if those situations arguably support an inference of discrimination, then it becomes a question for the jury to decide. Not a favorable forum for most defendants, of course.

The real legal dilemma here, it seems to me, is permitting interferences of discrimination to be drawn in instances where direct evidence of such animus is lacking. Couple that with a mere “preponderance” burden of proof, and the balance favors the plaintiff. BUT it should be noted that the majority of discrimination claims are rejected by the courts. In truth, it really isn’t very easy to extort money from corporations through EEO suits.

By: Deoxy

Deoxy — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 10:25:47 +0000

Kia,

Wow, I like that – it’s like “heads I win, tails you lose”, only with more money at stake.

Why do we even hav judges and juries? Any corporation with over $100 million revenue per year can just be automatically considered guilty, and we’ll sav the expense.

By: Ted

Ted — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:06:46 +0000

There is more than one case of an employee about to be fired for one legitimate reason or another seeking to inoculate themselves by becoming a whistleblower or raising some sort of other complaint in the hopes of having leverage to prevent discipline by the implicit threat to sue for retaliation. I’ve seen it firsthand at employers I’ve worked at.

While I have no evidence one way or the other that this is the sequence in the Haddad case, it is a not-unusual sequence that would be consistent with a month-long gap like that in the Haddad case, and at least as likely as the implausible case of someone retaliating over a pay dispute over the difference between $42.50/hour and $43.50/hour (which, NB, is still not gender discrimination by itself).

By: Anirban

Anirban — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:37:26 +0000

so long as she can hide it from her employer for eighteen months.

Then I suppose , her misdeeds caught up with her in those 2 weeks , after she was paid managerial level bonus,and Wal-mart,as per their own statement, didn’t have to do that,if she was not a manager per se. There are other ways of getting rid of trouble -makers. This is clearly not one of them. May be the Jury , as credulous as they may be sometimes in some other cases, saw that.

By: Ron Coleman

Ron Coleman — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:43:14 +0000

Old fashioned lawyers never comment to the press. They think they’re better off that way. I don’t understand the thinking, unless you have absolutely no meritorious story to tell.

By: Ted

Ted — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:12:13 +0000

I don’t see any basis in the law or in sound public policy for a rule that a woman cannot be fired for a dangerous violation of company policy that could expose the pharmacist to substantial liability so long as she can hide it from her employer for eighteen months.

Let’s change the scenario a bit: in January 2004, a Wal-Mart manager uses the n-word in chastising an African-American employee. Can Wal-Mart discipline the manager if the employee reports the offense in July 2005, or does the eighteen-month rule Franklin proposes apply there, also?

By: Kia

Kia — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 15:53:00 +0000

Walmart does suffer from damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t. They’re damned-if-they-do allow their employees to perpetrate fraud and then wait a year and a half to punish it, damned-if-they-don’t give men and women of equivalent employment status equivalent pay, or punish them equally for the same infraction.

By: Ted

Ted — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 14:12:32 +0000

Again, Ms. Haddad’s claim is that male pharmacists committed the same infraction and were not fired. That’s either 100% true, or 100% false, and needs no jury to decide: she either has an example (in which case Wal-Mart has liability problems), or she doesn’t, in which case her claim should be thrown out before it reaches a jury. There’s nothing for a he-said/she-said dispute, and nothing where a human resources expert helps a jury to make a legitimate decision.

By: markm

markm — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 12:58:37 +0000

The pharmacist violated the basic rules of her profession, and broke the law. I can’t see any employer keeping such a pharmacist on the job – but it’s likely that Walmart’s never fired someone for the same offense, because she’s the first to ever commit it.