Gallup guilty, but workers stay sacked

05/June/2001

Judge Richard Linton has found Gallup guilty of unlawfully interfering with its employees' rights to join, and recruit members for, a trade union but has ruled against four interviewers who claimed the company unfairly dismissed them for being union activists.

In the first case Gallup was convicted earlier this year of having infringed the right of employees at its Austin, Texas call centre to join a union, namely the United Steelworkers of America. The company's appeal in that case is still pending.

The other case concerned similar behaviour by Gallup at its Houston, Texas call centre but also involved the dismissal from that workplace of the four activists two years ago.

Judge Linton ruled that the company had acted unlawfully in making coercive statements to its Houston employees. He ordered that it should cease to interfere with the distribution of union literature and to require employees to report attempts to persuade them to join a union.

However, he refused to accept that the four activists - Sherri Lee, Janice Rinehart, Patrick Snyder and Lynne Zieler - had been fired because of their work for the union and not for the reasons alleged at the time by their employer.

The claim by Snyder is of particular interest since the company acknowledged that he had been the Houston office's most decorated employee, having won about a dozen awards as Interviewer of the Month, Interviewer of the Year etc.

Alleged against him was that he committed three disruptive acts at work. The first two consisted of rude remarks to supervisors. The third, interpreted by Gallup as sexual harassment, was a bantering remark to a female colleague during an office pyjama party.

Judge Linton himself said that the third charge "is patently absurd in view of the widespread sexual innuendo generally omnipresent in the Gallup workplace."

He nevertheless accepted that the minor sarcasms directed by Snyder against supervisors were the genuine grounds on which this highly valued employee was fired and not a pretext for getting rid of a labour union activist.

Nor was the judge willing to reject Gallup's account of why it fired the other three people. Sherri Lee and Janice Rinehart were accused by the company of "falsification of hours worked" and Lynne Zieler of "using profanity in a telephone survey with a survey participant."

It must be said that much of the learned judge's 200-page written decision reads, as does the transcript of the trial itself, like a low-grade Hollywood farce.

Consider the following.

Judge Linton: "The sole ground for Zieler's discharge...is that Gallup found merit to an alleged June 17 telephone complaint by an alleged 'irate' survey participant (asserted to be Kevin Kline) that, in an attempted telephone survey on June 7, Zieler allegedly asked the reluctant Kline 'What is your problem, asshole?'...

"I have not overlooked the Government's surprise witnesses... These witnesses are Kevin Kline and his father, Donald Kline, with the latter testifying first. Residents of Pennsylvania, the Klines flew to Houston and denied that anyone from Gallup had ever been rude to them or called either of them an asshole."

Linton still could not convince himself that Gallup had acted in bad faith in firing the Houston four. An appeal is being lodged; in the words of one of the four, Janice Rinehart, "It ain't over!"

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