Ohio firm must pay $22.5 million to mom whose baby died after she was denied work-from-home

Known in all of Ohio to be garbage since at least early 2000's when they recruited on my campus in northern ohio.  They are slime.

Third-Party Logistics Brokerages are already known to be shitty. It’s well known that they like to lure in young college grads who know nothing about corporate America, promise them the world, work them into the grave in the first 6 months, and then fire & steal all of their customers. Even in that industry, everyone else knows that TQL is dogshit amongst a pile of shit.

Came to the comments before opening the article - couldn’t be less surprised to hear this was TQL

TQL is known as absolute garbage in the logistics industry too. Surprised to see (usually uninformed) people actually use them.

The platonic ideal of churn and burn.

Everywhere I have been they are known to be absolutely horrible to work for. Its almost impressive they have gotten to the size they are with such a glaringly bad reputation

ive worked here for 2.5 years and I just put in my notice today. done

They are known in the industry to be absolute scumbags.

This got me. I hope the internet lights’em up. Absolutely abhorrent.

Absolutely despicable. I don’t know how leadership at companies like this can sleep at night, I’d never be able to.

I live in the Cincinnati area. Absolutely no damage was done to TQL's reputation. Everyone here knows it's the shittiest place to work by far, only the most desperate take a job there. Literally no one is here is surprised.

They can't sue her back. They were found liable by a jury, their reputation is public record. They can appeal the amount to get it reduced though.

>"We are evaluating legal options and remain committed to supporting the health and well-being of our employees,” said Daugherty. This "corporate public relations" way of speaking is one of my biggest pet peeves, especially after something like the tragic death of a newborn. How can these shameless, remorseless subhuman rats say shit like "we are committed to supporting the health of our employees" in response to losing a lawsuit about how you tried so hard to *not* support a young mother that you were found liable in court for the death of her child, while in the same breath *also* saying you want to make sure that this grieving young mother gets as *little* money as you can legally give her? And all of that is supposed to amount to being "committed to supporting the health and well-being of our employees", which is such a pale f****** lie that it's insulting that they expect us to actually believe it. Every aspect of this PR doublespeak drives me up a wall.

They can try appeal, but you can't sue someone back after a trial happens. You need to bring up those issues at trial.

Even the Executive knew they were fucked. Byeeeee TQL.

The firm makes billions a year (not an exaggeration) - they’re suing back to send a warning shot to other employees

Let's us remember to boycott the companies who use TQL till TQL drops further legal action regarding this case:  Hello Fresh,  Nestle,  PepsiCo,  Walmart,  and Procter & Gamble

I commute 25 miles a day to sit in an office by myself, conduct 90% of my work online, and meet with folks in person for about an hour a week, before turning around and going another 25 miles back home. This is the dumbest shit ever.

Yep, that was my exact situation: All my actual work was with people in other places in the building or one of the other offices, so it was all email and Teams, and I sat with the other people who did my same job, but we didn't actually work with each other. The nice thing was that my company didn't care if we worked from home, so I eventually stopped going in, and they gave away my desk. It was all working great! Until the pandemic, when everyone had to work from home during the lockdown (again, proving it was totally fine and feasible to do our work remotely) but the company decided to mandate something like 3 days a week in office afterward once things opened up. So they went from not having a policy about how often you had to be in the office to everyone working from home full-time to suddenly forcing everyone in for the majority of the time. Truly infuriating. Thankfully for me at least, I had already moved to another city where there wasn't an office and gone officially "virtual," so I don't have to go in, but the idea that they would do that made me just see even more how your company does not care about you in the slightest.

When my friend received a RTO notice, I asked if his job was going to move him to Florida or India. 70% of his days is spent in remote meetings and that remaining 30% is working on servers which could be done anywhere with a decent enough internet connection.

Same. My office just introduced these glass boxes for us to take private meetings. Now we can commute to an office to sit in boxes for online meetings.

CFOs are still using the old playbook that office space as an asset balances your risk. It’s dumb.

But the execs can come in a few times a year and look at the peasants and feel smugly superior. You can't put a price on that.

Same here. I just don't go in. There's literally nobody there to care enough to say anything and the dept I work in is adjacent to the people who check, we're all friends. It's an open secret at this point. I'm the only team member in my state.

I had a disastrous surgery, when I was forced to go back to work (my PCP was on maternity leave and the doctors who took their place laughed at me when I said I was too weak and sick to go back to work from a iron that was seven points lower than the lowest recommended healthy level, and suffered from severe fatigue and dizziness), and I had to go back to work, not even WFH. The whole time that I worked there I had to crawl on the bus on Friday’s because I couldn’t get on otherwise after the surgery.  What I was doing? All computer work. Nothing on site, nothing that required me to set foot in the office.  My mom was f****** livid.

Same. I get so much more work done when I work from home. 

>they would’ve worked her straight up to the birth. They did!

Correction: **her husband knew the right people.** No one in her chain of command wanted to do the right thing. So the husband talked to a guy who talked to a guy and got it sorted… or would have. Im tired, Boss.

And the fact that we dont have laws prohibiting these things is disgusting 

And that it was a *man* that had to get the ball rolling to reverse that decision. God forbid a woman actually be listened to and treated fairly.

Especially if they want people to be having babies, but I guess it's easier to just let half the country try for another round of the children of the decree.

Of course it's TQL. They're known as being shit to deal with and are considered a bottom tier carrier in my industry. It would fill my heart with joy to see them go under

Basically extortion.

That poor women is probably never going to forgive herself, and she didn’t even do anything wrong.

This practice doesn't just keep the labor force in line... Don't forget how healthcare tied to employment also supports the insurers' bottom line by making sure only folks healthy enough to work get insurance! Too sick to work? Bummer, maybe you'll die. It's the great two-person swindle of the American capitalist experiment.

Most Americans do support UH. The issue is that public support doesn’t matter. Princeton did a study and found that support for policy by the bottom 80% had zero predictive ability on whether something becomes a law or not. When the top 20% did it was effectively a guarantee that it would.  I know everyone keeps saying Trumps term is the “end of democracy” in the US, but it’s not. The Us never had a real democracy, not when it was founded, not now, and not in between. It’s always been a dictatorship of capital. 

So bizzare to observe from scandinavia how americans are constantly braying about their freedoms while literally being livestock in a giant human stable. Americans are enslaved.

OMG I thought the same thing. I bet plaintiff's counsel used that quote to full effect.

The first rule of working at a company that could be the target of litigation is you don’t talk about the company being the target of litigation.

That line sure did piss me off.

The executive said this after the HR rep informed them that her WFH was denied and he approved it. If they were informed of her request when she first made in then this situation never would have happened. Her loss was due to some middle manager going on a power trip, not a company policy or evil exec trying to rule with an iron fist.

That’s the kinda thing that gets executives murdered in the streets

It's okay though. Fines come out of a different bucket so I still came out looking good. \- TQL management, probably

Wait to you hear about paid sick leave entitlememts in civilised countries.....

But then her manager can't micromanage over her shoulder to dial dial dial???

I really, really hope you never have to.

I'm currently almost as pregnant as she was. This pregnancy follows a pregnancy loss at 10 weeks in November, and I've already had 5 ultrasounds because I've been almost continuously bleeding since my positive test.  If I were her or her husband, I'd be murderous. How f****** dare them. This was avoidable. This child should have lived and this woman should have been able to raise her daughter. The pain must be unimaginable. She KNEW it was a risky pregnancy and had every ability to do her job and protect her child and they did not allow that for her. Horrific. 

First thought immediately.

Yep. That's amazing life-changing money. But she's going to be thinking back "what if?" all the time and missing her baby and seeing her grow up. All those life milestones gone.

And I'll add a rant since I despised them. They loved double brokering, a contract violation, and then trying to cover it up when caught. They loved bidding rates then backing out when they found out they came in too low to double broker coverage which got them banned from working for us. But my favorite, they found out the companies we were partners with and tried to sell themselves as a way to cut us out by offering cheaper shipping rates. Got reported back to us because they were incompetent shitheads who managed to get a trial chance from a gullible shipping manager. Imagine the 20 yo frat d***** who fucked up hiring a single truck for a trial shipment and shut a manufacturing line down calling the company they screwed and asking, not for more business, for all the business to be put in their hands. That's how they got banned from multiple tiers of the same logistic chain.

but, hey, this just in, the white house is asking congress for $200 billion. $200 billion to kill people in another country, not $200 billion to extend health insurance subsidies.

We can’t afford healthcare because we are busy blowing up people in far away lands.

If it was California, you can just go on short term disability for up to 90% of your income. High risk pregnancies have 1 year of coverage that you start prior to delivery. Shitty states and shitty companies.

It took someone who knew someone to get a reasonable request pushed through. Disgusting

If the manager alerted the plaintiff of a reversal in decision to WFH, a part of me believes the manager was making this call himself or not giving full details to HR. I bet the call the friendly executive made was more of ‘Hey, you all are going to get sued. Get your people in line’

Also note the comment from the executive. "You just saved us a lawsuit." Not a "Hey, thanks for bringing this up, the health of our employee and her baby are a priority." Just concerned that they could get sued. Which they did. F*** them right into rush hour traffic.

I notice this when calling organizations and companies all the time. My wife gets nowhere saying all the right things, then I get on the phone and magically it's like Moses parts the Red Sea. Total BS. It doesn't seem to matter what gender the person I'm talking to is, few take a women's problem seriously. I've read studies this effect shows up all over society like for pain management and medication allotment.

Nothing is dumber than when my wife does all the legwork to find a contractor, vets them, brings them in, and then they spend all their time trying to talk to me and asking questions about my preferences while I vainly try to subliminally signal to them that they should really be talking to her. Like my dude, if it was up to me I'd live in an unpainted box, do you think I have an opinion on what color the planters should be? I'm just here so I don't get fined.

A lot of assholes in middle management. They dangle promotions and bonuses over your head so that you’ll keep treating people like shit so they (upper management) don’t have to.

They have no bottom. It's just terrible all the way down.