Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

If you read the arbitration decision, it sounds a lot like the termination had not as much to do with the substance of the comedy routines, and more to do with Brad Laszewski, WHYY's VP of Admin Services (which is what WHYY calls HR), getting a bug up their ass about Jad Grievant getting to work from home. There's several pages of this guy going up and down the chain (including to the CEO) pointing out that Grievant had the temerity to do stand-up while on a WFH doctor's note for MS.

In context, the complaints about the material itself seem pretty pretextual.

Edit

A frustrating detail here, just in the sense that it's petty turtles all the way down here: the arbitrator found that WHYY's social media policy, which prohibits "inflammatory" speech without qualification, was in fact binding and did provide WHYY with cause to terminate (the arbitrary was vocal about how stupid they felt this policy was).

The reason Grievant got the reinstatement order was that WHYY's HR fucked up their own process and committed to the termination procedure without including Grievant's direct manager in that process. A pure technicality.

His name is "Jad Sleiman", "Grievant" is how he's referred to in an arbitration case, just like "Plaintiff" would be used in a court case.

D'oh, thank you for the catch! I got tripped up b/c his Insta doesn't use his surname.

I wonder if there was some other personal conflict involved (maybe the Manager of Risk Management, Director of Facilities, or VP of Admin Services got hilariously teased by the comedian and found it publicly humiliating or something). Seems like too dramatic a grudge to be just based on ticking some procedural boxes.

In any event, good work by the SAG AFTRA legal team, and it's nice to have the arbitrator overturn this kind of petty bullshit.

https://www.phillymag.com/news/2024/01/03/jad-sleiman-whyy-f...

Yeah, I think it's saying the same thing. And, I mean, as an example of how pretextual the content analysis is here, WHYY's HR complained that "the mere mention of 9/11" was disrespectful to those who died that day. It's pretty unserious.

It reads to me like HR at WHYY picked a turf fight and, in losing it, cost WHYY a quarter million dollars. The original HR instigator appears to have been promoted.

> Grievant had the temerity to do stand-up while on a WFH doctor's note for MS

This adds a huge amount of context to this article. A big issue was that he was doing comedy, it's that he was doing it on company time.

The article mentions things like "raises concerns about the boundaries of remote work" and I was completely confused why they kept bringing up working from home if the article was bout inflammatory jokes.

I'll add that I am on Jad's side here, but the full un-biased picture is important.

He wasn't doing comedy "on company time". He was working from home during the workday with a note from a doctor (because the stress of the office caused him some medical hardship, as someone with multiple sclerosis), and also on some evenings doing stand-up comedy.

Here's a note sent to him by his immediate manager (who was supportive but cut out of the firing decision):

> Hey Jad, I just want to give you a heads up that somebody within WHYY is agitating about your stand-up comedy stuff. I have gotten questions from HR – in terms of “How come Jad can do stand up but he can’t work in the office?” And somebody even reached out to Bill [Marrazzo, CEO] [...] I have no idea who that person is – or why they are doing this. So far, I have been able to deflect any inquiries, and I said that your doctor is most worried about stress. I said that being in the office causes you stress, whereas stand-up comedy does not. [...]

Really, without the HR procedural mix-up, this is a completely valid complaint by the employer.

To make a case that coming into an office to work causes you undue stress, but that standing up in front of a bunch of people to do comedy does not, is a big stretch. Seems like an abuse of medical leave, to me.

If you’ve never been to a comedy show, they’re not usually during working hours.

Unless you're a comedian...

The "boundaries of remote work" means more "his coworkers only see him online, so his other online persona might be visible to his coworkers". If his coworkers or business associates find his online stand up, they might not be able to separate it from him because they only know him from online work, not in person.

Just about anything that "raises concerns about remote work" simply means one or more pro-office people have used it as an excuse to question remote work. Companies rarely question the boundaries of in person work when firing employees for actions caught while representing the company off hours (driving company vehicle, wearing company uniform).

I had down-voted your comment but then figured it’s a simple misinterpretation of the quoted sentence so I reversed the downvote. Sibling comments have already clarified the context of the quoted sentence.

As I understand it, SAG-AFTRA already has a general concern (not confined to this specific case) about how WFH affects the working conditions of employees:

> “Something that the union is kind of concerned about is the way remote work has changed the way we work,” Sleiman said. “We’re always online, on Slack and shit, so when are we off the clock?

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