Holy Crap, Labor / Employment, Nauseating Things

Legal Precedent Set By The 'Devious Defecator'

Have a rogue pooper in the workplace? Well, employers cannot request genetic materials to find the culprit.

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You don’t often think of poop when you think of the law… scratch that — maybe you do. But this story uses poop in a whole new way.

Picture it: you’re at work — it’s a good job at a grocery distributor and you’re just minding your own business — when pandemonium breaks out. Seems a psychopath prankster started taking a dump — yup, POOPING — in the warehouse aisles and in the canned goods section.

Your employer is understandably upset about this turn of events. They’d like to root out this rogue sh*tter and, ehm, eliminate him from the company. Laudable goal, but your employer cannot request DNA samples in order to find the culprit.

This isn’t just a drill — its the true case of the “devious defecator”  (the alliterative moniker was coined by the district judge) and it has set an important legal precedent.

U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg decided that in making that request, Atlas Logistics Group Retail Services (the employer in my fact pattern above) violated the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). This week a jury really let Atlas have it when they assessed damages. As Slate reports:

On Monday a jury in an Atlanta-based federal district court awarded [plaintiffs] Lowe and Reynolds a stunning $2.2 million: $475,000 in compensatory damages for mental pain, and $1.75 million in punitive damages as a deterrence to any company thinking about requesting its employers’ genetic material… The astonishing jury award is expected to be lowered on appeal, but Lowe and Reynolds will probably walk away with a healthy sum.

Yeah, GINA, the law in question, is pretty clear about all the things employers cannot do in relation to their employees’ genetic material. The list of the verboden activities includes “request[ing], requir[ing], or purchas[ing] genetic information with respect to an employee.”

GINA is being hailed as a modern civil rights law — no one wants to see Gattaca become real life. So, employers: don’t ask for your employees’ DNA, no matter how much you want to catch your feces outlaw. And employees, please limit your defecation to the proper facilities designated for those purposes — that’s just good life advice.

Jury Awards $2.2 Million to Employees Over DNA Tests in “Devious Defecator” Case [Slate]

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