Timothy Ryan didn't just harass women at Davis Cartage Co. He used the company's own surveillance cameras to do it — allegedly zooming in on employees' bodies from his office, then calling down to reprimand them for talking to each other because he'd been watching.

That's the EEOC's allegation in a lawsuit filed Friday against the Michigan logistics company, and it's not your garden-variety harassment case.

Ryan is the company's president of logistics. He's also on the board of directors and a part owner of the company. According to the complaint, he propositioned employees for years — pornography discussions, requests for massages, promises of promotions and cash bonuses for sexual favors, invitations to his cabin, an offer to let one employee sleep in his hotel room if she got too drunk.

One employee complained to HR back in 2020. The EEOC says HR's response wasn't an investigation. It was a cover-up — allegedly forging a document to discredit her and skipping interviews with witnesses who could've corroborated her story.

Ryan faced no discipline. The harassment allegedly continued at company Christmas parties, then escalated in 2023 against two more employees, A.M. and T.H., both of whom he'd allegedly hand-picked and told they'd "owe him." One of them says he leaned over her desk so closely she could feel his breath.

Employers, "harassment prevention starts at the top" isn't a platitude. It's a structural fact about how power works inside a company.

When the harasser is a line supervisor, HR can investigate, discipline, or fire him without much political cost. When the harasser owns a piece of the company and sits on its board, HR isn't investigating a subordinate. It's investigating a boss. And if this complaint is accurate, that's exactly what broke down here — HR protected the power structure instead of the employee who reported it.

There are a few things this case should drive home for employers:

1. Your harassment policy has to survive contact with leadership. A policy that only works against employees three levels below the C-suite isn't a policy. It's theater.

2. HR needs a reporting line that doesn't run through the accused. If the alleged harasser has enough influence to shape how HR responds, you need an outside investigator, a board-level escalation path, or both.

3. "No prior discipline" isn't a defense once someone's complained. A documented 2020 complaint followed by continued conduct in 2023 is exactly the pattern that turns a harassment claim into an expensive lesson.

Culture doesn't trickle down. Neither does accountability — unless you build a system and a culture that allows it to run uphill, too.

What's the last thing you wanted more than anything else in the world?

Not a promotion. Not a raise. Not even a Guardians World Series parade or a quadruple for the Arsenal.

I mean the thing you'd give up almost anything for. The thing that keeps you up at night hoping it happens, and a little scared that it won't.

For my son, that thing is England. Specifically, university in England.

He wants to study there. Live there. Build a career there, on the business and finance side of an English football club. Not playing. Helping run things. Contracts, budgets, transfers and balance sheets — the machinery behind the badge on the kit.

You can't build that career from Ohio. You build it by being there. Studying there. Networking, interning, and meeting the people who are already doing the job you want. Becoming part of that world instead of watching it from four thousand miles away, at 10:00 on a Saturday morning from a local supporters' pub.

So he set the goal. Then he did the hard part. The studying. The grades. The tests. The application essays. That's the part I'm proudest of. Not that his dream might come true. That he's the one making it come true.

Yesterday, the waiting ended. His first acceptance email landed. One school. One step closer to something he wants more than anything.

I won't pretend I was composed about it. My son is standing on the precipice of actually pulling off his dream. As a parent, there's no scouting report for that feeling. Just pride, a little relief, a screenshot of an email I'm never deleting, and, yes, some tears of joy.

He's not there yet. 

Four schools still to hear from. One big decision yet to make. And a senior year to finish. But the door just opened for him, and he's more than ready to jump through it. 

---

Here's what I read this week that you should read, too.

Samuel Adams Boston Brewery Front of House Staff Vote to Unionize — via Brewbound

My boss says the company owns all my personal time, not just work hours — via Ask a Manager

Why 'We Only Use AI For Marketing' Is Still A Bar Complaint Waiting To Happen — via Above the Law

Here's what employees really need during any change — via Ragan Communications

Dolly Parton Estate Asks for Restraining Order Against Fired Nephew Who Led Security — via Consequence

Heineken's New AI Project is a Monstrosity — via Beervana

Employees Know the Policy. They Don't Know What to Do With It — via Improve Your HR by Suzanne Lucas, the Evil HR Lady

Trucking Business Avoids WARN Act Liability as a "Faltering Company" — via EntertainHR

Equity Can Motivate Frontline Employees—If They See Their Impact on the Bottom Line — via Harvard Business Review

Religious bias requires more than knowledge of employee's accommodation need, court says — via HR Dive 

Beyond AI Slop: Preparing Law Students for Responsible Practice in the AI Era — via ADR Prof Blog

Three Employees Refused the Same Drug Test. Only the White Employee Got His Job Back. — via Eric Meyer's Employer Handbook Blog

Bernie Sanders is right about the four-day workweek – but wrong about how to get there — via The Guardian

An employee on short-term disability is ready to come back. HR tells them they need a release from the doctor who took them off work. Fair enough. Then HR adds a twist: tell us when the appointment is so we can be on the phone to hear the doctor clear you. The employee thinks that's illegal and that HR is entitled to a note saying whether they can return and with what restrictions, nothing more.

I saw these facts on the AskHR subreddit. I thought it deserved an answer.

The employee is right. Here's what an employer should do instead.

Under the FMLA (which often runs alongside STD)

1. Tell them up front. You can require a fitness-for-duty certification only if you apply that policy uniformly to similarly situated employees and you said so in the FMLA designation notice.

2. Limit it to the condition that caused the leave. The certification addresses that health condition and nothing else. If you want the doctor to address the employee's ability to perform the essential functions of the job, send a list of those functions with the designation notice.

3. Clarify, don't interrogate. You can contact the provider, but only to clarify or authenticate the certification, and only after giving the employee a chance to fix any deficiency. No requests for more information. No calls from the employee's direct supervisor. No delaying the return while you sort it out.

4. Skip the second opinion. Unlike a leave certification, the FMLA doesn't let you demand a second or third opinion on a fitness-for-duty certification.

Under the ADA

5. Ask only what's job-related. Medical inquiries of current employees must be "job-related and consistent with business necessity." Can they do the job? With what restrictions? For how long? That's your lane. A live feed of the exam, with its diagnosis, history, and medications, isn't.

6. Treat restrictions as a starting point. A release with restrictions triggers the interactive process. Talk with the employee about reasonable accommodations. Don't reject the note because it isn't a clean 100% release.

7. Time the exam correctly. If the absence was FMLA leave, an ADA fitness-for-duty exam, if you need one at all, comes after the employee returns, not as a condition of returning.

8. Lock it down. Medical information goes in a separate, confidential file. Supervisors only get the restrictions they need to manage, not the diagnosis or other medical information.

Under HIPAA

9. HIPAA does't apply here. It regulates health care providers and health plans, not employers acting as employers.

An employer needs the doctor's answer. It doesn't need a doctor's appointment.

You can prove trade secrets theft cold and still lose the injunction.

That's the lesson from the 6th Circuit's recent decision in UEC Holdings v. Hatcher.

Steven Hatcher was VP of the utility division at United Electric, a Kentucky contractor. United Electric fired him in August 2025 for poor performance, dishonesty, and safety violations. Pulling his devices, the company found a month of texts with Troy Kent, owner of competitor Kent Power. Hatcher had shared pricing models and union hiring rates, then deleted the texts before turning in his phone. At the hearing, he didn't even deny some of what he shared was trade secret information. And when asked on the witness stand whether he'd had Hatcher review the pricing before submitting it to LG&E, Kent admitted: "Yeah, in some way."

The trial court granted a sweeping injunction anyway. The 6th Circuit vacated it.

There are two reasons why the court vacated the injunction, and both matter to any employer suing a departing exec for stealing trade secrets.  

First, fear of competition is not irreparable harm. Kent Power had landed a contract with a shared customer, Louisville Gas & Electric, around the same time Hatcher was sharing the stolen data. But it was work United Electric can't perform, and Kent Power's two actual attempts to win business United Electric does perform were both rejected. No lost accounts. No lost revenue. Just a worry that it might happen someday. The court called that a "generalized fear of a larger competitor" and held that fear alone doesn't support an injunction, no matter how bad the underlying conduct looks.  

Second, the remedy has to be tailored to the harm, not just deserved. The trial court also ordered forensic examiners to search "all relevant data sources" on the defendants' devices for "responsive items." No named custodians. No defined scope. No protocol protecting the defendants' own confidential data, or their employees' health records, from exposure along the way. A verbal "agreement in principle" on safeguards didn't cut it. Vacated.

Winning on the merits and winning an injunction are two different fights. Trade secrets law makes plaintiffs win both. And just because you can prove a departed employee did something "bad" doesn't mean you can enjoin him from continuing to do it. You might just have to settle for money damages.

Bartending doesn't launder a manager's cut of the tip pool. That's the entire lesson of a recent Department of Labor Opinion Letter.

Here's the setup. A restaurant has servers "tip out" a percentage of sales to bartenders, hosts, and bussers. One employee—titled "shift supervisor"—periodically works bartending shifts. While bartending, he also sets schedules, decides when shifts end, and handles other management functions. He collects a tip out from the servers. He also grabs a slice of the tips meant for hosts and bussers when he pitches in to help them.

Can he keep any of it? The answer is a clear, "No."

If this employee's duties satisfy the executive exemption test—primary duty of management, customarily directs two or more full-time employees, and has real hiring/firing/promotion authority—he's a "manager or supervisor" under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Full stop.

It doesn't matter that he also tends bar. It doesn't matter that he's helping out servers who are shorthanded. Once you meet the duties test, you're locked out of other people's tips, period.

Title doesn't control this. Duties do. A sometimes-bartender with no manager title who schedules staff, orders inventory, and helps hire people is still a manager for tip purposes, and still can't touch the tip jar.

There is one important exception. A manager can keep tips a customer hands her directly, for service she personally and solely provided. If she tends bar and a customer drops a five in her personal jar or in her hand, she can keep it. But the second the tip get pooled and split with the other bartenders and workers on shift, she is out—because now it's impossible to say the tip was for her alone.

1. Stop looking at the title. Look at the duties. "Shift supervisor," "lead," "keyholder"—none of that matters to WHD. What matters is whether the person is directing staff, setting schedules, and carrying real hiring and firing weight. If yes, they're out of the tip pool no matter what the badge says.

2. Segregate any tips a manager legitimately earns solo. If a manager works a shift doing hands-on service work, make sure any tips attributable only to that manager stay separate from the pooled tips. Mixed in with everyone else's, they're contaminated—and now the manager can't keep any of it.

3. Know what it costs you if you get this wrong. This isn't just a "give the money back" violation. Improperly letting a manager keep tips also blows the tip credit for every tipped employee affected. That turns a tip-pool mistake into a minimum-wage violation, with all the back-pay exposure that comes with it.

The math is simple: manage, and you don't get tips. Pick one.

Three commutes; zero compensation WIRTW #810 (the 'Aix's and Eau's' edition) 6 tips to stop a thief within your business The two-day mistake that sent retaliation claim to trial Big firm ability. Small firm agility.