There are bad managers. There are clueless managers. And then there's this manager, who just entered the race for Worst Employer of 2026.

An employee's father dies. The employee takes two days of bereavement leave immediately after the death. Then comes the harder part: planning the funeral, coordinating family travel, handling legal matters, cleaning out a house, and grieving like an actual human being.

So naturally his boss asked him to "consider limiting" his time off and maybe "take the second week off later" because staffing would be tight.

Yes. Really.

According to the viral Reddit post, the employee's father had been cremated, the family was awaiting an autopsy report, relatives needed to coordinate international travel, and the employee was trying to finalize funeral arrangements while navigating the emotional wreckage that follows the death of a parent.

The boss's response? Essentially: "Could you move the funeral? We're short-staffed."

What makes this story especially galling isn't just the lack of empathy. It's the spectacular failure of leadership judgment.

Here's a management rule that shouldn't need explaining: when an employee's parent or other close relation dies, you don't make that employee feel guilty for taking time to bury them.

You don't reference last year's vacation schedule. You don't complain about "undue stress on the team." And you definitely don't ask them to workshop alternate funeral dates around business operations.

Because no employee will ever forget that moment.

Employees can tolerate difficult deadlines and long hours. What they don't forget is how an employer treated them during the worst moments of their lives.

That's what destroys trust permanently.

And from a business perspective, this boss is incredibly shortsighted.

Want disengagement? This is how you get it. Want turnover? This is how you get it.

Employers love talking about loyalty, commitment, and culture. But culture is not your mission statement. Culture is how you treat people when life punches them in the face.

Bereavement policies are minimum standards, not maximums. Leadership demands humanity beyond whatever the handbook technically says.

If you're a manager reading this, here's the lesson: there are moments when operational inconvenience simply does not matter. A parent's funeral is one of them.

Figure out coverage. Redistribute work. Roll up your sleeves.

But don't ask an employee to rearrange grief around the staffing schedule.
Because if your business cannot survive one employee attending his father's funeral, your real problem isn't PTO coverage. It's leadership.

And this failure of leadership will earn you a nomination as the Worst Employer of 2026.

The pandemic-era "golden age of employee benefits" is over.

At least, that's the message some employers are sending as companies like Deloitte and Zoom slash paid parental leave and other family-friendly benefits.

And make no mistake, employees are paying attention.

For the past decade, and particularly since Covid sent most workers to their homes, employers spent a lot of time telling workers that they cared about things like "work-life balance." Companies competed to offer expanded parental leave, fertility coverage, adoption assistance, remote work flexibility, and caregiving support.

Now? Some of those same employers are quietly walking it all back, simply because they can.

When the labor market tightens, employers become generous. When the labor market softens, many revert to form. As the New York Times reports, Deloitte recently cut family leave in half for certain employees while also reducing vacation and eliminating adoption, surrogacy, and IVF support for some workers. Zoom also trimmed its parental leave offerings.

This isn't really about whether 16 weeks is objectively better than 8 weeks. It's about what these decisions communicate culturally.

Benefits are values statements. When an employer expands paid leave, it signals: "We understand employees have lives and families outside of work."

When an employer cuts those benefits, employees hear something very different: "Those priorities matter less now." Workers, however, have long memories about how companies behave during difficult moments.

The irony is that employers spent years learning the important lesson that flexibility and family-supportive policies are not merely perks. They are recruiting and retention tools. They help reduce turnover. They help keep women in the workforce. They help employees stay engaged and productive. That lesson apparently becomes easier to forget when quarterly budgets tighten.

To be fair, not every company is retreating. Starbucks recently expanded parental leave for retail workers. Some employers still understand that supporting working parents is good business, not charity.

But the broader trend matters because it reflects a changing employer mindset.

The post-pandemic rhetoric about empathy, employee wellness, and caregiving responsibilities is colliding with economic reality and political backlash against anything perceived as adjacent to DEI initiatives. Family-friendly policies increasingly are being viewed not as business necessities, but as optional costs.

That's shortsighted.

The United States already lags virtually every industrialized nation in paid family leave protections. Most American workers still depend entirely on employer generosity because there is no federal paid leave guarantee.

Which means every employer decision in this space carries outsized weight. Employees notice who supports families when times are hard. They also notice who stops supporting them the moment the leverage shifts.

The EEOC thinks it just filed a blockbuster anti-DEI lawsuit against The New York Times.

I never expected to fall in love with English football in my 50s. Yet here we are.

A couple of years ago, I started following Arsenal FC. What began as casual curiosity turned into waking up early on weekends, structuring Saturdays around matches, and finding my way to our local Arsenal supporters' bar.

What's struck me most about Premier League culture isn't just the football. It's the songs.

Every player has one. Every meaningful moment has one. The supporters don’t just watch the match; they participate in it. One chant starts in the corner, another picks up across the room, and suddenly the whole bar is singing in unison for a defender, a winger, or the club's newest star.

It's joyful. Tribal. Loud. Completely unlike anything in American sports culture.

So I decided to see what would happen if I asked ChatGPT to write a football song about me.

The result was better than it had any right to be.

🎶  🎶  🎶

He tells you the risk and the move you should make,
Then wins the damn case while plaintiffs pump their brakes.
From breweries to boardrooms they all sing his name:
OH, JON HYMAN, HE MAKES HR GREAT AGAIN!

🎶  🎶  🎶

Come on you Gunners!!!

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

Dems urge EEOC to retain pregnancy rule's IVF protections — via HR Dive

Can an Employee Sue for Failure to Accommodate a Disability She Said She Didn't Have? — via Eric Meyer's Employer Handbook Blog

Hallucinations, Inaccuracies, and the Erosion of the Rule of Law — via Above the Law

Asking people to do a one-week work trial before offering them the job — via Ask a Manager

DOL Proposes New Joint Employer Rule: What Employers Need to Know — via Employment Law Letter

AI Resume Screeners Have a Favorite Candidate: Other AI — via Improve Your HR by Suzanne Lucas, the Evil HR Lady

The Psychological Costs of Adopting AI — via Harvard Business Review

Vibes Versus Numbers: The Real State of Craft Beer — via Beervana

Why Breweries Can Hire Staff But Can't Keep Them (And How to Fix It) — via The Brewer Magazine

Tag, You're It: The NFL Franchise Tag as a Modern Non-Compete Agreement — via The L•E•Jer

3 Dangerous Password Habits You Should Avoid — via Boy Genius Report

How does a case like this ever get to trial?

That was my first thought after reading Griffin v. Copper Cellar Corp.

Rose Griffin worked as a cook at a Tennessee restaurant. According to the 6th Circuit, one coworker repeatedly grabbed her breasts, arranged food at her workstation to look like an ejaculating penis, told her he wanted to have sex with her, pushed her down onto a prep station while thrusting against her, and stuck his hands down his pants while massaging himself in front of her.

This was not subtle workplace misconduct. It was repeated, physical sexual harassment.

And when Griffin complained? A supervisor allegedly told her to "keep [her] head down and [her] mouth shut." Managers allegedly laughed about the harassment. The damage to Griffin was severe. She testified that she felt humiliated and violated, suffered nightmares, lost sleep and appetite, experienced chest tightness and muscle spasms, and even contemplated suicide.

A jury found for Griffin on her hostile-work-environment claim and awarded her $179,000 in compensatory damages. The district court later awarded another $480,364.50 in attorneys' fees.

Copper Cellar appealed. The 6th Circuit affirmed everything.

So let's do the math. Copper Cellar now owes more than $659,000, before interest and costs, plus whatever it paid its own lawyers to defend the case through trial, post-trial motions, and appeal. All after reportedly offering just $25,000 to settle the case before trial.

Sometimes, the smartest litigation strategy is knowing when you have a losing hand.

Employers hate paying settlements. I understand why. No company wants to reward litigation or admit wrongdoing.

But litigation is not about pride. It is about risk.

And when your risk includes a jury hearing evidence that a female employee was groped, sexually humiliated, ignored by management, and pushed into suicidal thoughts, you do not roll the dice unless you've exhausted all options.

This employer chose to roll the dice. And it lost badly.

The lesson is not merely "don't sexually harass employees." That should be obvious.

The real lesson is that when the facts are this bad, listen to your lawyer when they tell you it is time to settle.

Because juries do not like employers that tolerate this kind of conduct. And appellate courts are not going to rescue you from the consequences.

The 11th Circuit just lowered the bar on racial harassment Is paid family and medical leave finally coming to Ohio? WIRTW #797: the 'compliment' edition The 5th nominee for the Worst Employer of 2026 is … The Caucasian Chooser Voluntary retirement incentives vs. age discrimination