Bully tactics

MARIE: We’ve hinted a couple of times at the long and hard conflict with Jon’s employer that we fought and finally won, but we have never given any details. Well, now that Jon’s disability pension is all settled and there is no “risk” that he will be forced back to work, we think it is time to tell the story.

To cut a very long story short and stuff it into a nutshell, what happened is this. Jon was off sick from work for a few months before he was diagnosed with PD, and for a few weeks after as his PD medication was started. He then returned to work as normal. But his superiors had by now realized that Jon could turn into a serious liability (because Dutch employment law is very generous to sick employees).

Naturally, you are not allowed to fire people on the basis that they might get sick again soon, so instead somebody tried to engineer a situation where Jon could be fired for not meeting his targets. The interesting thing was that no targets had ever been set for Jon.

So the employer set up a catch-22:
1) they would not accept Jon’s claim to be well enough to work again until they had a clear description of his job and could see that he was capable of doing it, and
2) the job description that they insisted Jon must now agree to in writing included such wildly unrealistic targets that he was absolutely certain to fall short.

Smart thinking, eh? It took 8 months of increasingly frantic and adversarial e-mails, letters and meetings, and the involvement (at our initiative) of a legal advisor, several doctors and an advisor from the Dutch department for work and pensions, before at last the employer ran out of obstacles and objections and had to accept that Jon was both legally and actually back at work as normal.

Now, conflict between employees and employers is of course quite commonplace, but what really strikes me about this particular case is the enormous power imbalance. A huge corporation brimming with legal and HR experts, versus one man trying to get on with his life in spite of a tough diagnosis that he has yet to fully come to terms with. They ground him down and robbed him of all self-confidence with their constant insistence that he was not fit to do his job. The terrible thing is that with PD, that will become true sooner or later, so this was also a race against time that the employer tried their level best to drag out indefinitely.

Halfway through this process, Jon was no longer in any state to fight his corner, he was mentally and physically at rock bottom. If Jon had been on his own, he would have given up and signed where they wanted him to, and would have lost a very significant chunk of his pension entitlement. Fortunately, I was by then so furious that I was just dying to take over where Jon had to leave off, so for the next several months I wrote letters and e-mails in his name and put exact words into his mouth for meetings. The employer refused to talk to me directly, and in the end also refused to answer “Jon’s” e-mails. Oh, it makes me angry all over again just thinking about it!

It makes me angry for all the people who don’t have a wife spoiling for a fight, and for all the people who are intimidated by bosses and legal documents and red tape into dropping legitimate claims. And particularly it makes me angry for Jon who could, with a bit of support and flexibility, have continued to be productive for longer and (this is what I really mind) have had a much less traumatic transition into retirement.

They should be ashamed of themselves.