– from Children’s Friend and Family (CFF)
On Friday morning, February 23, 2007, it felt like a crisis was developing at CFF based on what I considered to be yet another mistaken interpretation of state law by “Priscilla”, the Comptroller. To forestall the crisis, I decided to go into the office to do some filing and to put in the “face time” she was demanding.
My intention was to then go visit my friend Bud who had fallen ill. While I was doing the paperwork in the file room, my manager, “Florence”, came and asked if she and “Mary”, the clinical director, could talk to me “in 5 minutes”. I said yes, but told her that I had to leave soon. After 20 minutes she had not reappeared. I asked the receptionist to tell Florence that I had waited but had to leave.
In the car, on my way to the hospital, my cell phone rang. It was Florence, who requested that I immediately return to work. I told her that I could not. She asked if we could meet later in the day, and I told her that I was going to be busy all day. She then said, “Mary wants to talk to you” and put Mary on the phone.
What do you have to say?
Mary sounded enraged and her first words to me were, “what do you have to say?” I asked her if she was referring to my email. She said yes. I asked her if she had read my email. She said that she had. I said that I thought that my email was clear. She said, “So you think that your email was clear”.
I said, “Yes”. She said, “Well, company policy states that if you miss two days of work without contacting your manager, you can be discharged. Therefore we are discharging you, effective immediately, for not coming in to talk to us now and for missing two days of work.”
Of course, I had been in communication with my manager, Florence, who knew perfectly well where I was and how to reach me. Mary’s stated reason for firing me was nonsense, but her rage, given that multiple times I had both privately and publicly questioned her policies, was understandable.
I was filled with relief, as if a weight had been lifted from me. That was my immediate reaction, relief; I yelled out with happiness in the car. I no longer had to work for what I considered to be uncaring, incompetent, bullying management.
My second reaction was shock. I had not expected Mary to do this, though in retrospect, we had many conflicts and she had the power to resolve them by firing me.
I suspected that, over the previous year, we each had our own “calculators” running, she weighing my significant productivity vs. my “insubordination”, me weighing the bureaucratic demands and poor practices vs. my growing independence.
I was increasingly unwilling to tolerate agency policies and practices that I considered to be counterproductive and hostile to me, other clinicians, and our clients.
A little later that day, I was called by the executive director of the boy’s home I had been going into. He informed me that he had gotten a call from Florence telling him “that you are no longer an employee of Children’s Friend.”
He told me that it had been a pleasure working with me and that he would be happy to provide a recommendation should I ever need one. I asked him to make it clear to the boys that I had not abandoned them. He assured me that he would do so.
Quick, change the locks!
I learned that the locks to the agency doors had been changed and that Florence was calling my adult clients and the parents of some of my student clients telling them that I “was no longer with the agency”.
This statement left open the interpretation that I had abandoned my clients by quitting. I learned that the agency never called the Spanish speaking parents of the students whose parents needed to be communicated with in Spanish.
I thought that Mary’s actions towards my clients was uncaring and unethical, both by not allowing me time to say goodbye with them, and in the agency’s subsequent neglect of them. Florence, of course, was “just the messenger”, a role of which I suspect she was not proud.
I looked in the CFF Personnel Practices Handbook and found the clause that Mary used to terminate my employment. Of course, she knew that I was working from home as I had done every day for many months after she gave my office to Priscilla, leaving me with no office.
7.2 Attendance and Punctuality
… If you are absent for two days without notifying Children’s Friend, it is assumed that you have voluntarily abandoned your position with Children’s Friend, and you may be removed from the payroll.
On February 26 I received a letter signed by Priscilla, the VP, Finance and Operations, that began:
“Dear Frank, We advise you that your employment with Friends of Families and Children Services, Inc. is being terminated effective Friday, February 23, 2007. As an at-will employee, either CFF or you can terminate your employment with CFF at any time.”
In this communication, CFF moved from alleging that they had cause to discharge me, which they did not, to a statement that they did not need cause.
Most agencies operate as “employment-at-will” enterprises. This status calls into question their claims of social responsibility. Nothing stops agencies from renouncing employment-at-will and agreeing to only discharge for cause.
I spoke with the school adjustment counselors who expressed the hope that I would find another way to come into the school and see kids, perhaps under the auspices of another agency.
I applied for unemployment compensation and planned to apply at other agencies as well as focus on building my private practice. I needed to get onto the Mass Health behavioral health panels if I wanted to continue to see kids in schools.
A few days after I applied at the Division of Unemployment Assistance, one of their employees called to tell me that CFF was contesting my application, saying that I was “discharged for cause”.
I told the caller that CFF had no cause and that I wished to have a hearing. When he informed them of my challenge, CFF withdrew their contestation. Conflicts must be waged (Kriesberg, 2009).
One reason that they might have contested my claim is that they are self-insured, that is, rather than pay into a pool, believing that they will have few claims against them, they took the risk of having to pay out-of-pocket for claims.
From what I and other employees have seen, they have a history of getting people to resign under threat of discharge, thereby saving the agency money.
Not only do CFF and other agencies have high rates of turnover, but I and my fellow current and former CFF employees had seen allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination based upon sexual orientation trigger legal complaints against CFF, which included the threat of lawsuit.
These cases were always settled secretly, with the complainant compelled to agree that she would not divulge the complaint or the settlement. Such secrecy allows the perpetrators of misconduct and the misconduct itself to continue. This is one of the reasons that I think it valuable to write in detail about my experiences, both as a clinician and as an employee.
As allowed by the CFF Personnel Practices Handbook, I appealed the discharge to Marvin, the CEO. I also sent CFF a demand that they pay me for the productivity that I had earned that was sitting in their “productivity pool”.
On March 2, Mary responded saying in part, “… As our policy states, ‘If, at the end of the calendar year, a fulltime clinician has exceeded 1200 productivity units, that clinician will be paid a bonus.’ You are not eligible for a bonus as you did not exceed 1200 productivity units.”
This was the first clear statement answering a question I and others had been asking since the new policy was announced. They planned to keep the money. I thought that, like some of their other policies, it was probably illegal.
My appeal to Marvin was denied. I had considered the appeal meeting with Marvin to have been remarkable in that we were able to talk about the actual charge against me – absent two days without excuse, and examine the evidence.
He was so open to my account that I was naïve enough to think that he might reverse the firing. A short conversation at the start of the meeting should have alerted me to the probable outcome.
Marvin asked me what I hoped would happen as a result of the meeting. The only other person in the room was the Human Resources manager. I replied that I wanted to see the discharge reversed.
He said, to my surprise, “I don’t know if I have the authority to do that”. He turned to the H.R. person, two steps below him in the management hierarchy and asked her, “Do I?” To her credit, she replied without hesitation, “if you don’t then who does? Of course you do”.
That small interchange revealed much about the nature of CFF management. Marvin relied so much on those who reported to him that they seemed to him to have more power than he did, even though he was their boss.
He asked me why, given all the conflict, I would want to return to the agency. I told him that I would be open to a negotiated departure with time to say goodbye to my clients. I thought that discharge was not the way to do it.
He agreed that the way I was fired was harmful to my clients but said, “It can’t be helped due to legal concerns”. I believe that he agreed with my perspective, but he would not reverse my discharge because to do so would have so undermined the power and authority of Mary and Priscilla.
My conversation with Marvin felt like a good dialogue; we both listened and considered thoughtfully the words of the other. Even with this dialogue, the overall relations of power could not be shifted because it was a contest that his managers believed they could not afford to lose. CFF’s mask of caring fell off and they had to rely on brute force to get rid of me.
I challenged CFF for not paying me for my productivity overage by filing a complaint with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General’s Fair Labor Division. Again, when challenged, CFF was found to be in the wrong. I was subsequently paid in full “restitution for unpaid wages”.
Foucault wrote, “… the real political task … is to criticize the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked … “. My discharge showed school adjustment counselors that CFF was uncaring about the kids for which they were responsible.
I started applying at other agencies, being forthcoming about having been discharged by CFF, a fact that did not seem to faze prospective employers; more than one interviewer said that they had met other clinicians who had bad experiences with Children’s Friend management. I focused on agencies that already sent or could send clinicians into the local schools.
Many of my CFF school based clients were assigned to Dave, the clinician to whom I had already referred some students when I had narrowed my client focus to fewer schools. Dave lived in Cambridge.
He had a long commute to CFF, which caused him to do as much paperwork at home as possible. After I was fired for not being physically present at CFF, CFF managers now needed to be consistent with their irrational policy.
Florence told Dave that he could no longer work from home and told him that he must come to the office or take a vacation day, even though he had structured his work week so that he could do paperwork at home on Fridays.
This caused Dave to quit just three weeks after he had started seeing some of my former clients, leaving them abandoned for the second time in less than a month. Many of them were never assigned another therapist and were very glad to see me when I was later able to return to the school through another agency.
A CFF clinician friend told me that he and Florence went into the middle school to speak with the adjustment counselors, who were upset about my having been discharged. The adjustment counselors were angry because my clients, their students, were abandoned and I had been treated unfairly.
After my discharge, CFF was unable to regain the high regard in which they had been held at that school. Their business suffered as a result.