Posted on 04/15/2022 5:27:14 PM PDT by nickcarraway
If you are going to throw a birthday party for an employee, make sure that person wants one. A recent case proved to be costly for a northern Kentucky medical testing company.
Kevin Berling took his former employer to court after claiming to suffer a panic attack and arguing that his stress caused him to lose his job, WLKY-TV reported. Jurors in Kenton County Circuit Court agreed this week and awarded Berling $450,000, the television station reported.
According to Berling, in August 2019 he asked the office manager of his employer, Covington-based Gravity Diagnostics, not to hold a birthday celebration for him, the Courier-Journal reported. Being the center of attention causes him immense stress, Berling said, according to court documents.
On Berling’s birthday, Aug. 7, 2021, his office arranged for a lunchtime party, WLKY reported. Berling said he suffered a panic attack after learning about the surprise luncheon, according to the television station.
“The person who was responsible for the birthday parties who he talked to flat out forgot about his request,” Berling’s attorney, Tony Bucher, told Link NKY. “She didn’t do it to be mean. She said she would accommodate it and she just forgot.”
According to court documents, Berling left the office and spent the lunch break in his car.
Berling sent a text message to the office manager, and the next day he was called into a meeting, WLKY reported.
“According to my client, she started reading him the riot act and accused him of stealing other co-workers’ joy,” Bucher told Link NKY. The meeting then triggered another panic attack, and Berling asked the office manager to stop, according to the lawsuit.
“The way (the Gravity Diagnostics employees) say it, they believed he was enraged and possibly about to get violent,” Bucher told Link NKY.
Bucher claimed that Berling did not make any threatening gestures, the website reported.
Berling said he was sent home for the next two days and was notified that weekend that he was being fired “because of the events of the previous week,” WLKY reported.
Berling sued Gravity Diagnostics on the grounds of disability discrimination and retaliation, according to court documents. According to the lawsuit, Berling said that since Gravity Diagnostics did not accommodate his anxiety disorder, the birthday party and the events afterward caused him “to suffer from a loss of income and benefits and emotional distress and mental anxiety.”
The $450,000 awarded by the jury included $300,000 for emotional distress and $150,000 for lost wages, WLKY reported.
Julie Brazil, Gravity Diagnostics founder and COO, said the verdict does not represent facts or the company’s employer rights by law.
“My employees de-escalated the situation to get the plaintiff out of the building as quickly as possible while removing his access to the building, alerting me and sending out security reminders to ensure he could not access the building, which is exactly what they were supposed to do,” Brazil told Link NKY. “As an employer who puts our employee safety first, we have a zero-tolerance policy and we stand by our decision to terminate the plaintiff for his violation of our workplace violence policy.
“My employees were the victims in this case, not the plaintiff.”
Brazil said her company is challenging the verdict, according to Link NKY.
Simply leaving, doesn’t acknowledge the pattern of abuse. Much like a rape victim remaining silent; the sadist who enjoys making others uncomfortable (and believe me, there are sadists in management who actually enjoy doing this sort of thing) gets to laugh all the way home about how he was able to force his will upon someone else.
I am sure that the CEO will write that check for $450k; then do a thorough review of “why did this happen”. Corrective actions will take place. I sincerely doubt this was the only victim.
Liberals embrace “woke”, because as Elon Musk pointed out, it gives vicious and mean people an excuse to be vicious and mean, while cloaked in armor of moral superiority. They do not understand manners, logic, ethics or freedom or respect basic courtesy- but they do understand money
Oh puhleeez. IF you are that affected by panic attacks go somewhere and be a hermit
I absolutely despise workplace birthday parties. I don’t play and make sure I’m off site with a customer or at a medical appointment or some such thing just to avoid them. I work with these assholes, it doesn’t mean that I want to socialize with them in any way that isn’t directly related to earning revenue. So project team socializing events are acceptable (team cohesion can benefit), but socializing with HR, Accounts Payable, and Quality? Yuck.
I’m not a big fan of birthday parties with friends but I tolerate them for the sake of those who throw them for me.
So I don’t blame the guy for being pissed off. But there’s a difference between being pissed and throwing a tantrum.
Even though he won that amount he will have deducted lawyer fees. And he has to report the full amount to the IRS as income(he can deduct lawyer fees I believe) so he will be paying taxes on this until he gets his next gig. The money will not last and probably will not be much left after paying everyone.
They very much are
Total insanity. Our tort system is totally insane.
“...450K for getting his feelings upset?”
You’ve obviously ZERO CLUE what a panic attack entails or you wouldn’t come of like such a jughead.
Panic Attacks are immune to logic, pay no heed to the desires of their victims, and have no knowable severity or duration until they are over. They can include loss of vestibular sense triggering terrifyingly disorienting vertigo, and accompanying tachycardia capable of ending in an Emergency Room. The victim may experience complete blackout, and loss of hearing and other sensory input. Short of loss of consciousness, victims may experience their entire universe shrunk down to a single, luminous pinhole surrounded with blackness.
Only with an extremity of effort are victims able to pierce through the swirling miasma of disorientation and force themselves to precisely regulate their breathing in a desperate bid to apply some kind — any kind — of physiological brake that might eventually slow the reeling carousel and bring the episode to a stop.
Though they vary in severity from one sufferer to another, NO panic attack is at all pleasant, and to ignore reasonable requests to spare someone from circumstances they believe would trigger one, and force the situation upon them anyway — that’s actual malice of a dirty, rotten schoolyard bully type.
I once had to endure an ugly stripper that posed as a client touring the facility until she started getting to familiar. Then she handcuffed me to my chair and the instigators brought out the cake, ice cream and birthday hats. The stripper only shucked down to her skivvies but that was bad enough.
I was the Senior Technician, always known as an upright and controlled person. The women co-workers had a grand old time. I was stoic as usual but I resented it.
Plus the fact that I had a gorgeous wife at home made their stripper look even more repulsive and was also an insult to my taste and discernment.
Did you even read the article? The guy did walk out and was fired for causing displeasure to his co-workers. He should be a multimillionaire now.
$150K was lost wages, $300K was for emotional distress - that’s not actually outrageous for the latter.
This is not dissimilar to having your wife die on a significant day, your co-workers deciding that you need a party to cheer up about the anniversary, you telling them no repeatedly, and then *going right the hell ahead and throwing a company party on that day anyway when they knew better.*
Stupidity of that magnitude deserves to be richly rewarded.
Except when he went to leave, they *fired* him.
FYI, he *did* try to leave. Read the article - they fired him for disassociating with the party.
Whoops didnt make it to the getting fired bit. That’s a whole nuther matter. Note to self: Read the whole article!
Does the award make a bit more sense to you now that you’ve read the whole thing, including the part where they fired him for “stealing joy from others” by leaving the party that he specifically requested not to happen?
well considering his attorneys probably got a good chunk of the damages I guess it makes sense. At any rate, the jury has spoken. We have to respect that. They heard the evidence.
My strategy is to avoid the situation and not be there in the first place. That way I don't have to be there and sit through it (or, as he did, get up and leave).
At which point, they fired him.
You nailed it ...
Exactly.
There's a bunch of unanswered questions here that neither of us know the answer to.
I'm not defending stupid work birthday parties. But in my experience, there's got to be something else going on.
If I was the guy's manager, I'd end up talking to him ("yeah, I hate these stupid situations too but if you're stuck in such a thing, then you just got to suck it up"), but firing him for going to his car during his lunch break? I don't care how chirpy or how woke the HR is, that, by itself, is not a reason by itself to can somebody.
But a lot of times, something stupid like this can be used as the straw that broke the camel's back. Sadly, a lot of managers and a lot of companies fail to keep a good record of underlying causes (past counseling and past reprimands) that then make them vulnerable to slick labor attorneys (if it isn't documented, then you have a hard time entering it into evidence). That, in my reading, is probably what happened here.
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