Theft of Time

1.What do you think are some of the factors in the modern workplace that contribute to a theft of time? How can those factors be managed?

Theft of Time is any employee who use his/her working hours to do other things that are not job related.

There are different ways an employee, sometimes without realize, may be stealing time from the company.

One of the examples are by allowing other employee clock him/her in without the person been there. Many employees leave the work place 10 -15 minutes earlier than usual to do personal business and ask other employers to clock them out at the usual time.

Over-extended breaks and smoke breaks are another great example of Thief of Time. Many employees use smoke break as an excuse for socialization taking more than the 5 minutes standard to do so. Lunch breaks and 15 minutes break are also mismanaged by employees, abusing of their time, taking longer breaks than the 30 to an hour standard.

Excessive personal time is one of the most common ways of Thief of Time by using working hours for browsing the web and social media, personal emails, phone calls, texting and other non related job activities.

An effective way of managing this problem is to implement new policy such a non smoking at working hours, and the addition of software that can help monitor the hours spend working, limited the access of the internet to only programs need for the job, creating email accounts for the company use, installing video cameras and/or security guards, change the swipe card system to a more advance and personal system such as fingerprints or Yubikeys and call recording for quality purpose only, that allow the employee monitored if is a personal call or work related and how long it took the call. It may seem extreme many of this suggestions but company wants to protect their interest and time that their employees are not working is money wasted.

2. What does the word Whistleblower mean (legally speaking)? Give an example of whistleblowing.

According to U.S Merit Systems Protection Board, Whistleblowing is " the disclosing information that you reasonably believe is evidence of a violation of any law, rule, or regulation, or gross mismanagement, a gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety" (Board, 2013). Other explanation is when an employee reports an illegal activity at his/her workplace made by any employee or employer and file a complain against this person.

A very common scenario is the sexual harassment. A Supervisor who constantly makes jokes with sexual tones and inappropriate physical contact to one of the. The employee decides to file a complain againts the Supervisor with the Manager.

Many of these cases can end up in retaliation from the accused side or the company affected but thanks to the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 (Public Law 101-12), the accuser is legalemte protected and may not be dismissed oh discriminated against in any way

3."Retaliation" has become one of the most often cited reasons for employees filing charges with the EEOC against their employers. Please define "retaliation" in the legal, employment sense - and explain when it is illegal. What can an employee do when they feel they have been retaliated against and for what reasons does retaliation rise to the level of an EEOC lawsuit?

The definition given by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is "Retaliation occurs when an employer, employment agency, or labor organization takes an adverse action against a covered individual because he or she engaged in a protected activity". In other words retaliation is when an employee is abused, intimidated, discriminated, fired or harass because the employee filed complain against other employee for discrimination or other illegal acts.

An employee who feel he have been retaliated against have the right to file complain with the EEOC within180 days of the alleged discrimination occurred. After this step, within 10 days the EEOC send written notification of complain to both parties describing