Fighting the Bad Fight

I’m sure most of us get frustrated when we hear of frivolous lawsuits. One that is often mentioned is from 1992 when a woman spilled McDonald’s coffee on her lap while driving and sued them because it burned her. She was awarded $160,000 in compensatory damages and $480,000 in punitive damages.

We probably also get frustrated when we hear of a union fighting to keep someone’s job when they did something so wrong or stupid that they deserved to be fired. I remember asking some of our CLAC members how we could be doing better. I was surprised by their response: “You guys need to let the bad apples go.”

They then told me stories about some workers who were always in trouble for either not doing their work or breaking rules and yet CLAC had got them a second chance. They were angry that justice wasn’t being done.

I recently had the same reaction when I read a news story about a fire chief who had been fired for having sex with a subordinate employee at his fire station. “The union fought the termination, arguing there should be no discipline because the privacy of these individuals was violated when they were caught having sexual relations in the fire chief's office (it was on a Sunday morning), with the door wide open.”

I was reminded of a Seinfeld episode when George Costanza is caught in a similar situation and when facing discipline blithely asks: “Was that wrong?”

I know that we all have a strong sense of justice in these situations and get angry when we think that someone is getting away with something. But sometimes things are not what they initially seem, and while we’re quick to want justice when it involves someone else, we probably would think differently if it was us or someone we love.

A good example of not considering all the details is actually the above case of the woman who sued for spilling hot coffee on herself. If you were on the jury, here are some of the facts you would have heard:

She wasn’t driving. Her grandson was and they were parked when she spilled the coffee when she tried to remove the lid.

McDonald’s operations manual required the franchisee to hold its coffee at 180° to 190° F—a temperature that is undrinkable and can cause third-degree burns in three to seven seconds.

The chairman of the department of mechanical engineering and biomechanical engineering at the University of Texas testified that this risk of harm is unacceptable, as did a widely recognized expert on burns, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Burn Care and Rehabilitation, the leading scholarly publication in the specialty.

McDonald’s admitted it had known about the risk of serious burns from its scalding hot coffee for more than 10 years. The risk had repeatedly been brought to its attention through numerous other claims and suits—700 of them.

McDonald’s admitted at trial that consumers were unaware of the extent of the risk of serious burns from their coffee when served at their then-required temperature.

Not surprisingly the jury sided with the woman. And instead of just awarding her the $20,000 that she had requested (to cover the cost of skin grafts for her third-degree burns) it was the jury who awarded her much more—mainly to encourage McDonald’s to change how it served coffee.

 I don’t know the details about the fire chief who was initially fired, but I do know that unions are legally obligated to represent every worker that they represent.  I also know that there are many cases where the details and context of a situation can change how we look at it – just like with the McDonald’s coffee suit. While it might be frustrating to hear of people seemingly escaping justice, it’s important that people are protected from being fired for any reason, and in some cases given their day in court or a second chance.