Bostock says what it says. LGBTQ+ discrimination is sex discrimination under Title VII. Period.

A federal judge in Atlanta, however, just read it to say something else.

Tara Kulwicki is a lesbian who wants a child. Her employer's health plan covers female infertility treatment. But to get it, a woman has to prove infertility—by having procreative sex for months without conceiving, or by paying for failed rounds of artificial insemination.

Straight women get the free option. Kulwicki has to pay.

So she sued her employers, Cobb Hospital and Wellstar Health System, claiming it's sex discrimination to make her pay out of pocket to qualify for the same fertility benefits straight women can reach by having sex with men. The court dismissed her claim, and had to do some mental gymnastics with Title VII and Bostock to get there.

Let's start with what the court got right. Bostock didn't make sexual orientation a protected trait separate from sex. It gets "swept in" through the but-for test applied to sex. In other words, change the gay woman's sex and she becomes a straight man whose attraction to women the employer tolerates. If the employer treats the gay woman differently, it's because of sex.

The court even concedes the point in a footnote. Flip Kulwicki's sex while holding her attraction to women constant, and she switches from homosexual to heterosexual. A "nominal quirk" of the Bostock test, the court wrote.

Except it's not a quirk. It's the whole point of the Bostock holding.

The court tried to use that same logic to dismiss Kulwicki's claim. Flip her sex, and a male Kulwicki gets no infertility coverage at all, because the plan only covers women. Give him a wife but keep him unable to conceive through intercourse, and he pays for insemination just like she does. Her problem, the court said, is a trait "not unique to women or lesbians."

But her inability isn't a bad knee. It exists because she's a woman attracted to women, so the plan's free option—sex with a man—isn't open to her. That's exactly the discrimination Bostock forbids.

If discrimination against LGBTQ+ employees is sex discrimination, this case was wrongly decided. Not partly. Entirely. Bostock says what it says. It doesn't come with an asterisk, and the Kulwicki court should not have applied one.

There are 35 things your workplace does not want to have in common with the Premier League's investigation of Manchester City.

That's how many of the 115 Premier League charges against Man City have nothing to do with the club's finances. They're for failing to cooperate with the league's investigation.

According to multiple reports, an independent commission has found City guilty of 114 of those 115 charges. Eighty involve breaches of financial rules from 2009 to 2018. The other 35 cover how City behaved once the league started asking questions. Sanctions haven't been set, and City is expected to appeal. But points deductions, even expulsion, are both on the table and deserved.

Nearly a third of the case isn't about what City did. It's about how City responded.

Employers make the same mistake all the time. And the Supreme Court has already told juries what to do about it. In Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing, the Court held that a jury can infer from a false explanation "that the employer is dissembling to cover up a discriminatory purpose." Lie about why you fired someone, and the lie becomes evidence of the very thing you're denying.

Juries take it from there.

For example, Luri v. Republic Services. Ron Luri refused to fire three employees because of their age. Republic fired him instead. His supervisors then fabricated evidence and backdated documents to build a sham paper trail justifying the termination. A Cleveland jury awarded $46.6 million, $43.1 million of it punitive, the largest retaliatory discharge verdict in Ohio history. Ohio's tort-reform cap later cut the punitives to $7 million. Still.

Or Zubulake v. UBS Warburg. UBS failed to preserve emails in a sex discrimination case, even after its own lawyers warned it to. The jury got an adverse inference instruction and returned $29.3 million, more than $20 million of it punitive. According to Zubulake, jurors were already convinced of the discrimination. The punitive number was about the emails.

And Boyle v. Wayfair. In April, a Boston jury rejected Mary Boyle's age discrimination claim. But it heard evidence that after she complained, management solicited negative feedback from her subordinates. Eight days after she returned from medical leave, she was on a PIP. The jury found retaliation and awarded $4.75 million, $4 million of it punitive.

In each case, what the employer did after the complaint cost more than the complaint itself.

City will fight the 80 on the merits. The 35, however, were self-inflicted. Don't hand a jury your own 35.

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. 

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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.

Catching the thief red-handed isn't enough to win a trade secrets case Your shift supervisors can't have it both ways with tipped wages Three commutes; zero compensation WIRTW #810 (the 'Aix's and Eau's' edition) 6 tips to stop a thief within your business