Harassment prevention can't stop at the boardroom

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.

WIRTW #811 (the 'uni' edition)

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.

Can HR listen in on an employee's doctor's appointment?

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.

Catching the thief red-handed isn't enough to win a trade secrets case

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.

Your shift supervisors can't have it both ways with tipped wages

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."