My son is a high school senior. His school has a tradition called the Senior Corner — a spot in the Upper School commons, television included, that seniors earn as a rite of passage. Not anymore. The TV is gone this year, and the explanation is that ...
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WIRTW #809 (the 'senioritis' edition)

My son is a high school senior. His school has a tradition called the Senior Corner — a spot in the Upper School commons, television included, that seniors earn as a rite of passage.

Not anymore.

The TV is gone this year, and the explanation is that last year's seniors were too loud and disturbed nearby classrooms.

Last year's seniors. Not this year's. The kids who caused the problem graduated. The kids paying for it did nothing wrong.

That's not discipline. That's an institution that didn't want to do the harder work of identifying who was actually being disruptive, so it punished everyone instead.

Sound familiar?

It's the same move John Morgan, of the law firm Morgan & Morgan, bragged about on video — describing how he monitors remote employees by, in his words, "putting cameras up employees' backsides."

Watch everyone. Make sure nobody's slacking.

That's not oversight. It's an admission that he doesn't know which employees are the problem, so he's decided to treat all of them as suspects.

Blanket discipline or surveillance is the corporate version of taking away the TV. It's what a manager reaches for when identifying and addressing the two or three underperforming employees feels like more work than monitoring everyone.

It's not a performance-management strategy. It's an avoidance strategy masquerading as one.

And it backfires in the workplace for the same reason it backfires in a school commons.

Your best employees notice.

They notice that their discipline, output, and integrity bought them nothing. That they're being treated exactly like the person who actually earned the scrutiny.

Once people figure that out, you've traded a performance problem for a morale problem. And morale problems are much harder to solve. Once you've killed morale, it's incredibly difficult to win it back.

If you've got employees who aren't working while remote, that's a real issue. Address it with them. Directly. Personally. Document it, manage it, and if it doesn't improve, part ways with them.

What you don't do is turn your entire workforce into a surveillance target because two people gave you a headache.

That's not management. That's giving every employee a reason to wonder why they bothered being good at their job in the first place.

Punish the offender. Not the workplace. 

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

HR Needs an AI Workforce Strategy Before the Layoffs — via EntertainHR

The AI and Communications Blueprint: 4 Things Every Comms Leader Needs to Get Right — via Ragan.com 

Why Every Employer Now Needs an AI Policy (Even If You Think You Don't Use AI) — via Employment & Human Rights Law In Canada 

How Do I Handle an Anonymous Complaint? — via Improve Your HR by Suzanne Lucas, the Evil HR Lady 

My coworker exposed our boss's affair with secret videos — via Ask a Manager

Wheel Of Fortune Announcer Suspended After Alleged Incident; Role Will Be Recast During Investigation — via TVLine

Alanis Morissette Accuses Ex-Tour Manager of Extortion Scheme in Lawsuit — via Consequence

Biglaw Firm's Emails Casually Insult 'Dumb Judge' And 'Poop Man' — via Above the Law

A False Cancer Diagnosis Could Not Cure the Employer’s Very Real ADA Problem — via Eric Meyer's Employer Handbook Blog

You Need to Understand Your Employees' Caregiving Responsibilities — via Harvard Business Review

Pay attention to personal liability for FLSA violations

Business owners, officers, and managers, this is why you need to pay attention to wage and hour issues. 

Tow truck driver Marquis Mariscal sued JLS Towing, alleging the company misclassified him and other drivers as independent contractors and paid them a flat rate per vehicle towed, no matter how many hours they worked. No overtime, ever, even past 40 hours a week. 

He not only sued the company, but also its president, Summer Settle, personally, claiming she directed the company's operations, set schedules, made hiring and firing calls, and controlled how drivers got paid.

Settle moved to dismiss the claims against her individually, arguing Texas law shields corporate officers from LLC liability. The court disagreed.

In wage and hour cases, the corporate shell is not a liability force field. The Fair Labor Standards Act doesn't care what your state's business code says. The FLSA defines "employer" to include any person acting in the interest of an employer, and courts have long held that a corporate officer with operational control over the workforce can be personally liable, jointly and severally, right alongside the company.

Liability is not absolute, and depends on the balancing of these four factors: 

1. Power to hire and fire. Not just a vote at the board table, but the actual authority to bring someone on or let them go.

2. Control over schedules and working conditions. Did this person set hours, assign shifts, or supervise day-to-day work?

3. Control over pay. Did they decide the rate, the method, or whether overtime got paid at all?

4. Maintenance of employment records. Someone has to keep the books on hours and pay. If it's you, that's evidence of control.

Mariscal alleged Settle checked every one of those boxes. That was enough to survive dismissal.

Being a co-owner who occasionally weighs in isn't enough on its own. Someone actually has to run the operation for liability to trigger. If you set the pay structure, sign off on schedules, and decide who gets hired or fired, an LLC or other corporate form won't save you when the overtime math goes wrong.

Titles don't create liability. Control does, and control doesn't come with a shield. If compliance isn't reason enough to get your wage and hour house in order, personal liability should be.

The EEOC has lost the plot

The EEOC has lost right to claim that it's for "equal employment opportunity."

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission exists to investigate workplace discrimination. Yet, on August 18, it signed a settlement promising never to do that again, for one group of employers, forever.

The employer is the Christian Employers Alliance. CEA sued the EEOC challenging its guidance treating gender identity discrimination as sex discrimination under Title VII. Instead of litigating it, the agency gave CEA everything it asked for.

The settlement bars the EEOC from ever pursuing a gender identity discrimination claim against a CEA member — not just the 20,000-plus employers already in the group, but any future member too, as long as they belonged when the discrimination allegedly happened. No expiration date. No court monitoring for compliance. Just permanent immunity from investigation.

CEA is already selling it that way. Its membership page reads "Join CEA and stop being exposed," under a banner promising members are "Protected the Moment You're In." Karla Gilbride, EEOC general counsel under the Biden administration and now at the ACLU, named it for what it is: "It's like they're selling an insurance policy against EEOC investigations."

The EEOC, however, already has a real process for religious objections: a case-by-case defense the agency weighs against the facts. This settlement skips that. Investigators can't open a file at all if the employer is a member. Gilbride called that carve-out "unprecedented." It creates a license for these employers to discriminate against a class of their employees. That should trouble everyone, no matter your religion or beliefs.

So what do you actually take from this settlement?

1. Membership isn't immunity from the courthouse. This blocks EEOC charges and investigations. It does nothing to a state discrimination claim or an employee's own lawsuit under Bostock, the Supreme Court precedent that defines transgender discrimination as sex discrimination. The case doesn't vanish — it shows up somewhere else, just without the EEOC doing the legwork for the plaintiff.

2. An association card is not a compliance policy. If "we joined this group" is your entire defense, you're betting on a settlement surviving a legal challenge to whether an agency can even do this.

3. Agency policy isn't law, and it turns over. This policy and the settlement it furthers exists because of who runs the EEOC right now. It remains to be seen if this settlement will survive future administrations or legal scrutiny.

The EEOC is supposed to police discrimination, not pre-clear it for a membership fee. When the enforcer starts selling exemptions from itself, it isn't just picking a side. It's forgetting the job it was hired to do. Call that religious liberty if you want. Just don't call it equal.

The 8th nominee for the Worst Employer of 2026 is … The Passport Pilferer

An agricultural labor contractor recruited five Guatemalan farmworkers under the H-2A visa program, charged them an illegal $2,500 annual fee to work, confiscated their passports, and threatened to have them deported if they complained. 

A federal jury didn't buy the defense. Neither did the 6th Circuit.

Purpose Point Harvesting and its owners, Milton and Lucille Gomez, employed Luis Gomez-Echeverria, Hervil Gomez-Echeverria, Darwin Joel Fuentes Perez, Artemio Coronado Esteban, and Leonel Lopez y Lopez, Guatemalan citizens with work visas for temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs, for the 2017 through 2019 growing seasons. The $2,500 annual recruitment fee — illegal under the H-2A program — amounted to more than a year's wages in Guatemala, forcing the workers to take out high-interest loans just to show up for the job.

It got worse from there.

Workers logged 19-hour days that never showed up on their paychecks, because records documenting their hours were destroyed.

They lived in small trailers, sleeping on couches instead of in beds.

Milton confiscated their passports and Social Security cards (a federal crime) and Lucille made herself an authorized user on workers' bank accounts without their knowledge, at one point withdrawing $2,500 from a worker's account herself.

When one worker needed medical care for an infected hand injury, he waited two weeks and ultimately needed surgery.

When workers tried to leave, Milton posted on Facebook that they were missing, and reported one to police as a missing person rather than to the Department of Labor, as the law required.

The jury found the defendants liable under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, the FLSA, and Michigan wage and trafficking law, awarding $105,000 in compensatory damages and $450,000 in punitive damages — a figure the 6th Circuit called "rather modest" given the conduct and the TVPRA's own 20-year, $500,000 criminal exposure. It's hard to argue with that assessment.

If your business model depends on illegal fees, confiscated documents, and the threat of deportation to keep people quiet, the punitive damages ratio was never going to be your problem. Your misconduct was. That's why Purpose Point Harvesting earned its nomination for the Worst Employer of 2026.

Hiring isn't a numbers game. It's a standards game.

Hiring is quality control. The moment you treat it as a numbers problem, you've already made your first bad hire.

The FBI is about to learn that lesson.

The bureau is short-staffed. It lost more than 1,100 special agents in 2025 alone, leaving the FBI with a significant staffing shortage. Its solution was to rewrite its hiring disqualification rules.

Under a June 16 internal memo reported by CBS News, applicants who admit to hiring prostitutes can now still be considered — as long as it happened fewer than three times and at least a decade ago. Applicants who stole from a former employer are in the clear if the theft is more than three years old. And applicants with a history of bestiality or animal cruelty are now eligible if the conduct occurred before they turned 18 — with no distinction, per CBS's sources, between an applicant who willingly engaged in the conduct and one who was a victim of childhood sexual abuse.

As recently as 2023, the FBI's own published guidance listed prostitution and bestiality among its automatic disqualifiers. That guidance is gone.

FBI Director Kash Patel insists this isn't a lowering of the bar. He's said the bureau is "not reducing our standards" and is instead "making it harder" to get hired, pointing to record application numbers as proof the pipeline is healthy.

Application volume, however, is not a quality metric.

No matter your industry or the composition of your workforce, a pile of resumes doesn't tell you anything about who you're actually about to hire. Loosening your disqualification criteria to keep the applicant count up isn't recruiting strategy. It's an admission that you can't attract enough qualified people under your real standards, so you moved the standards instead.

The mechanics look different outside federal law enforcement, but the tradeoff is identical. You relax a drug testing policy because you can't fill warehouse shifts. You skip the background check because the applicant pool is thin. You stop verifying references because it slows down time-to-hire.

Every one of those decisions feels like a staffing fix. None of them are. They're liability you're creating on purpose, in real time, because you decided quantity mattered more than quality.

The candidates who get past a lowered bar don't disappear once your building is full. They are now your workforce, and because of their shortcomings, your potential problems and liabilities. In the FBI's case, they become agents carrying federal authority and firearms. In your case, they become the employee HR can't fix and the lawsuit you should have seen coming but didn't.
      

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