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. 

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

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.

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 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.

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.

WIRTW #808 (the 'document, document, document' edition)

Earlier this week I appeared on a webinar hosted by SelectSoftware Reviews and sponsored by Insperity, on protecting your business through the employee lifecycle. We covered hiring, onboarding, performance management, and termination.

One theme kept surfacing, hour after hour, question after question.

Documentation.

By the end of the hour, it wasn't just a talking point. It was the takeaway.

If it's not written down, it didn't happen.

I don't mean that as a cute aphorism. I mean it as a description of how litigation actually works. Judges and juries don't care what you remember. They don't care what you meant to do, what you're sure you said, or what "everyone knew" about an employee's performance. They care about what you can show them.

Testimony is cheap. Anyone can take the stand and swear that Employee X was warned three times before termination. But without a written warning, a performance improvement plan, an email, text, or Slack message, a note in the file — something — that testimony is just a lawyer's client saying what a lawyer's client needs to say. Opposing counsel knows it. The jury knows it. And your credibility takes the hit.

This is Personnel File 101, but employers still get it wrong constantly:

• Managers give verbal counseling and never memorialize it.
• Performance issues live in a manager's head, not in a review.
• Terminations get built on a paper trail assembled after the decision, not before it.

That last one is its own special problem. Contemporaneous documentation, created in the ordinary course of business at or near the time of the event, is powerful evidence. Documentation manufactured after an EEOC charge lands or a lawsuit gets filed looks exactly like what it is — and plaintiffs' lawyers love pointing that out to a jury.

Employers, train your managers and supervisors to build the habit of writing it down when it happens, not when you need it. The write-up doesn't need to be a legal masterpiece. It just needs to exist.

Because in a courtroom, the absence of a document isn't neutral. It's evidence too — just not the kind you want.

You can watch the entire webinar here.

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

Why employers shouldn't mine employees' social media accounts

A federal judge just told Southwest Airlines what it can't look at on Facebook.

The court entered a permanent injunction barring Southwest from "proactively searching for, relying on, or using" Charlene Carter's religious statements — including her posts about abortion — in any future discipline, discharge, or other adverse action.

Here's the backstory. Southwest fired Carter after she sent her union president graphic anti-abortion images and video. She sued both Southwest and the union under Title VII for religious discrimination. In 2022, a jury awarded her $5 million (later reduced to $800,000), finding that employer and union discriminated and retaliated against her for her religious views. The 5th Circuit sent the trial court's injunction back down as overbroad. This is the judge's narrowed version.