– an IT pro gets screwed out of unused vacation pay and bonus. And the judge rules: “yes, the law is a mess … but it’s still the law”
Catarina Conti
Analyst
The Project Counsel Group
17 June 2019 (Washington, DC) – There is a case rocketing around “Ediscovery World” and we thought we’d do a review based on the summary judgment we read and some analysis in a few legal blogs.
Matthew White joined Hewlett-Packard in 2013 and left in July 2015, just months before the company split into HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). After quitting, he was stunned when the US mega-corp, citing HPE’s new policies, refused to hand over extra pay he felt was contractually due.
He went to court over it. And lost. Even after a judge stuck to a law he admitted was outdated.
The facts of the case are fairly straight-forward
– Hewlett-Packard had enticed White with a sweet contract that offered a signing bonus, base salary, regular bonuses, and a benefits program.
– But after he quit, he was left without his unused vacation pay and a $10,000 bonus he felt he was entitled to.
– He took the issue up with HPE, and sued the IT giant in a Maine federal district court.
– Things then spiraled to the point where even the judge felt the need to note it. In a footnote on the very first page of the summary judgment, Judge D. Brock Hornby (which is, incidentally, a terrific name for a judge) despairs: “I have spent an inordinate amount of time deciphering the record as the parties presented it in their dueling statement of material fact. For the most part I have bypassed them …”
– White claimed that under the contract he signed with HP, he should have been paid for unused vacation time. HPE pointed to its new policy that if you leave, you don’t get those days. Late in the court proceedings, which kicked off two years ago, White asked for a copy of the benefits policy when he joined – and HPE refused to provide it, making him even madder.
– White then pointed to Maine law that states unused vacation is equivalent to paid time.
– However, the judge dug into the law and found that while US state law does say that unused vacation is equivalent to pay, it also defers to employee contracts. And on the provision of policy argument, the judge sided with HPE, arguing that it was White’s fault that he didn’t get hold of the original HP policy earlier on in the case if he wanted to prove his point:
Summary judgment is not the time to litigate discovery issues; if HP failed to produce a document, White could have sought relief before the magistrate judge during discovery.
– As for the bonus: White said he was owed $10,000 in a bonus he earned through his work in 2014, however, HPE argued it had “not renewed” that bonus scheme in late 2014 so he wasn’t entitled to any more money. This was news to White, who was sure the program was still in place. So he again asked for the relevant copies of the policies, and HPE again failed to provide them.
The e-discovery issues
It turns out that HPE decided that, under the law, White could only get hold of the relevant policies if he turned up, in person, to the company’s official human resources headquarters – which is on the other side of America in California, roughly 2,500 miles away.
White felt this was ridiculous given that HPE is not only a massive organization with HR people all over the United States, but that it was a technology company with countless employees working across the world, often at home, and that the policies are likely readily available in an internal cloud.
The judge had some sympathy for that view:
This part of the statute may indeed need reworking for today’s world where cloud-based digital records are replacing physical file folders located in a physical location, where employees work at home – sometimes remotely from any head office or regional office – and where worldwide companies like HP assign HP personnel for an entire country or region, or even outsource various HP responsibilities.
Yet the judge still decided against the techie.
Yes, normally you get a signed copy of the employment contract at or near the time you sign but one employment law attorney I chatted with who has been doing defendant side work for 20+ years had these comments:
Handing over the copy resolves these issues but I can tell you there are many companies that do everything in their power not to follow the rules.
And I suspect part of that contract states “pay will be according to current HP(E) policies kept by HR and available on request”, rather than bundle loads of “policies” (some of which may not be relevant) into the contract verbatim.
And shitty but equally clumsy were his lawyers in the discovery phase. Because despite all this “meet & confer” and ethics bullshit, this is a business. It is all about money. And the corporate attorneys are paid to win, not be nice. So unless your attorney (or discovery specialist) is on the ball these companies will do everything they can to screw you. Been there countless times. And don’t rely on the magistrate judges. The ones you see at Legaltech are a rare breed. Most are ignorant as hell.
And once you leave a company, nothing is “easily available”. Nothing. How can you sign a document that links to documents you have no sight or control over that are “easily available”? Horrendous lawyering here.
And so it was a big “No” for White, and a big slap on the back for HPE, which managed to successfully hide behind outdated wording in order to stymie a former employee’s efforts to prove his case for payment.
Yes folks, it’s all love … until you leave. And if you work for HPE and don’t have a signed copy of your contract, you better get one.
Thoughts
This is not about the employment contract so much as it is about company policies. Having read through an IBM IT contract and a Microsoft IT contract that are most likely similar to the White/HPE contract, White’s contract probably states that the employee must act in accordance with the applicable company policies at all times, and that said policies may be updated from time to time as the company sees fit and at the company’s sole discretion, and that failure to follow policies is an essential clause of the contract and may be grounds to immediate dismissal with prejudice and without severance pay, etc.
Something like the above is the usual formulation. A large company such as HP may have a very brief contract basically stating the employee’s position and pay grade, and the rest is policies. Yes, policies may change, and I would agree that specifying every single policy in place at the time of signing is not workable – you will have a situation where policies will not apply uniformly but will depend on when every individual employee joined the company.
And, yes, HPE are total dunks in refusing to provide the policies just to win a case that they should not have won (otherwise they would just provide the policies and point out that the employees were properly informed and it is the plaintiff’s fault he didn’t pay attention).
And herein lies a lesson to all employees (not just HPEs): if/when a policy change is announced download the appropriate files and stash them away from the company’s storage. Just in case there is no announcement or in case you may have missed one download all the policies you know of periodically (say, every 6 months). Also – read them.
