Even before the start of the COVID-19 crisis, our CEO has demonstrated questionable leadership, but it has taken center stage during our new mandatory biweekly Zoom calls with all 300+ employees. These calls are meant to be an open forum for staff questions, but they end up being a chaotic platform for her to fixate on the virus death toll and typically leave staff with a lot more anxiety than clarity about the company’s planning.
If you don’t want to do that, you can still act as a group and benefit from a lot of the same protections that unions get. The National Labor Relations Act protects not just unionized workers but any nonmanagement workers acting as a group to speak out about working conditions . If there’s more than one of you, your employer cannot legally penalize you for advocating for different working conditions, and that includes collectively pushing for specific conditions around if/how you reopen.
Then I’d approach HR with your written concerns, not your CEO. At a 300-person company, hopefully you have professional HR , and they should be aware of the federal protections for this kind of organizing and should be able to communicate them to the CEO and others.∙ Suggest that your co-workers talk individually with their managers about how alarming and distracting the CEO’s Zoom meetings are, especially the most recent one, and how alarming the plans she alluded to are.
∙ If your state’s guidelines direct employers to encourage telework when it’s feasible, ask why your employer isn’t complying with that directive. If you’re convicted: Some states only permit current and prospective employers to consider convictions if the charge directly relates to the job, or require employers to take into account how serious the crime was.