Thread: packing at work
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Old October 7, 2011, 12:03 PM   #8
musher
Senior Member
 
Join Date: April 23, 2005
Posts: 462
Seems to me that you'd have real problems with this in an at will environment.

The employee-employer relationship is presumed voluntary and can be dissolved at any time for any (or no) reason with a few exceptions for protected classes.

Your continued acceptance of employment after having the conditions of that employment explained should be presumed to imply acceptance of the conditions and any real or perceived risk associated with those conditions.

The duty to provide a safe work environment doesn't entail protection against unforeseeable events like a meteorite puncturing your office ceiling. It also doesn't require extraordinary efforts to eliminate all risk from foreseeable events like a fire. Your employer is required to take reasonable precautions against killing you in a building fire, but isn't required to house you in a completely fireproof environment. It's a risk balancing and cost vs reasonable risk reduction kind of equation.

You might try to argue that banning personally carried firearms/weapons exposes you to unreasonable risk, but I'd suspect that a litany of the locks, alarms, "how to deal with robbers" instructions and so on would add up to reasonable precautions. I think this would be pretty compelling after the lawyers raised the specter of employee on employee violence and the risks that would be added to the workplace if they allowed employees to carry guns.

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...But Mr. Hartlock we have an obligation to balance the opposing risks to you from robbers and from Crazy Eddie down in accounting. This is an obligation we take very seriously. We have spent a great deal of time considering this very issue. It was our judgement and the judgement of our bean counters that, on the whole, you were exposed to less risk by banning the carry of firearms than you would have been had we allowed the carry of firearms in our office. We are truly sorry you got your tukus blown off, but as you know hindsight doesn't help make decisions.

Given the myriad examples of workers killing their coworkers because of stolen staplers, it was our carefully considered judgment that disarming you and Eddie, then training you to avoid irritating a robber ultimately exposed you to less risk than letting Crazy Eddie carry that Desert Eagle around the showroom.

We enforced a work environment that stacked the odds in favor of your safety, but unfortunately could not guarantee you zero risk. Nor were we required to reduce your risk to zero simply because such a thing is impossible.

We do wonder what you said to anger the robber who shot your tukus. We have decided it would be in your and the company's best interest to retake our scientifically designed "Don't upset the crooks" class. Perhaps carefully taking notes this time would help you understand the class better.

Finally, we do understand that your opinion differs from ours regarding the relative risks we are balancing with this policy. We understand that you might wish to seek employment at another agency who's risk management policy more closely corresponds with your own thinking. This has always been an option for you, even before the whole tukus thing happened.

Should you decide to stay with us, we will be more than happy to order you a 'no tukus' chair for your office to accomodate your new disability.
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