Employee Commits Suicide After Mongodb Fired Her During Mental Health Leave

I wonder if this should be the case. The state consists of it's voters and it's voted representatives. Companies and the economy in general, are secondary entities (unless you really treat them as people, which opens a whole can of worms, see PACs etc), and a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

As such, yes, be pro-economy, but don't forget the people having to live in that society.

Companies are made up of people. Companies only use people if the people who make up the companies are ok with it. Being a decisionmaker in a company doesn't give you carte blanche to behave like an amoral automaton.

So no, MongoDB are assholes for doing this. They could have had some humanity and prioritized human well-being over cost savings.

It's expected because of a large swath of defeatist citizens making comments like this. If we don't make this normal, it won't be normal.

> Really quite nasty of the company.

> This is a sad situation

I like this post where you agree with the person you’re replying to and then imagine somebody posting “Wow this was so unexpected because my worldview does not have room for companies to be mean, can somebody explain this??” and calling out that imaginary poster for being naive.

But this is particularly egregious

>>"...She asked for an extension to complete her treatment, or at the least a short period to consult with her medical providers about whether and how she might be able to return to work before the treatment was completed. .."

>>"An extension of Annie’s leave would have cost MongoDB nothing. We made it clear that they did not need to pay her or hold her job open for her. We just asked them not to fire her while she was in such a vulnerable state, as we feared that would result in tragedy. We just wanted a little more time to get her stabilized."

There is no plausible need of management that would outweigh simply letting someone stay on the books as "employed-on-unpaid-leave" for some extra weeks or months.

Whoever did this should be held personally responsible for negligent harm.

And yeah, never touching their software, IDGAF how useful it is.

Sickening

I wish someone had sat me down and told me this as a teenager, especially with the addendum that anything about "family" in business descriptions is nothing more than bullshit/marketing.

If companies operated as partnerships instead of limited liability companies, then I guess I could buy into this.

But states grant special privileges of capping personal liability for investors. Perhaps states should rethink the conditions for granting this if too many companies act like Gordon Gecko psycho paths.

The British East India company had its charter revoked once it started stepping over red lines. Voters need to reconsider the cart-blanche granting of privileges to corporate entities.

That is broadly true, but it's possibly better to pretend it isn't, because it is self-fulfilling.

The less people expect ethical behavior, the lower the pressure people feel to behave ethically... and repeat.

The US is somewhere in the middle, right there with some European countries. It's hard to say what drives people over the edge. Surprisingly Uruguay is high up there but Uganda, Ghana and Colombia are low.

I suspect a major way for the U.S. would be the one mentioned in the article: make it so that losing your job doesn't mean losing your health insurance. That's a major additional stressor, particularly if someone loses their job because of an illness.

Of course, there's about a negative one thousand percent chance of something like that passing in the current political climate.

Yes, exactly. Taking mental health leave should be seen as a positive step: an opportunity to overcome whatever difficulties you've been facing, leading to - amongst many other benefits - better performance at work.

Mental health problems are tricky; they tend to creep up on us gradually, and often some form of external trigger is needed in order to prompt us to seek help. So it shouldn't be at all surprising that an employee in receipt of a PIP might take mental health leave as part of a genuine effort to improve their situation.

gp's cynical "counterfactual" suggests that they view PIPs as being purely a sham, intended to always result in dismissal rather than improved performance. Now, that might occasionally be true - but we should be blaming the abusive employer (who is likely acting outside the law) in that situation, not the employee.

this is too radical even for china or like good ol USSR… damn dude :)

On the other hand, it may end up the other way: pressure you or bully you into quitting yourself. Here in Spain it happens sometimes: firing you is expensive and they don't want you around for whatever issue, so they'll try to find any justification to fire you, or just pressure you in some way on another to make you miserable enough to quit. No doubt that would happen in the US.

    From a legal standpoint, it occurs when an employee is forced to resign because of intolerable working conditions which violate employment legislation, such as:

    Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA)
    Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA)
    Change in schedules in order to force employee to quit (title 12)
    Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA)
    Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA)
    Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA)
    Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII)

    To succeed on a claim for constructive discharge, you must be able to prove at least three elements:

    Your employer was trying to force you to resign by intentionally and knowingly creating an employment environment that was intolerable and aggravated;
    This unbearable, hostile workplace gave you no choice but to resign; and,
    Your employer was motivated to get rid of you for illegal, retaliatory or discriminatory reasons.

Apparently.

Define "drive". Correlation is not causation. It's difficult to anticipate a trigger for a particular action or choice when their could have been other circumstances or stressors that contributed to the decision. Many have lost jobs without ending their own lives and many have killed themselves despite high-profile, gainful employment. Instead, holding MongoDB responsible risks incentivizing this company and others to turn away and preemptively furlough anyone remotely approaching the statistical profile of a suicide risk.

Unfortunately, it’s not as strong a case as you’d think. One of three cases has to be true: either she was disabled and unable to work, disabled but able to fulfill job duties, or not disabled at all.

In the first case Mongo can likely fire her once FMLA is up (notice that the termination is 12 weeks after she started leave). Disabilities aren’t protected if they leave you unable to perform job duties, which is what Mongo will claim. Notice how the complaint tries to say additional leave is “reasonable accommodation”. Mongo will claim not working at all means you’re not fulfilling job duties and that she used up her FMLA.

In theory if you become unable to do your job due to disability you should get disability insurance, which is mandatory in NY, but it sounds like Prudential rejected the claim, hence the letter from the doctor there.

In the latter two cases, then Mongo will claim that she could come back to work and asking her to was not violating any ADA laws, and that they would have been willing to make e.g. scheduling accommodations for any treatments and so on to accommodate a disability that doesn’t prevent her from fulfilling core job duties.

And whether they have stones or not, or whether their manager is a bully, and so on and so on ...

Cobra is great if you have a lot of money, because it's still expensive.

Why shouldn't her medical providers be responsible for continuing critical health care regardless of payment? Why is it on the employer who is only tangentially related to this versus the people actually charging large sums of money for medically necessary treatment?

Also, the same health insurance can be continued after termination (with some external payment, of course) in addition to medicaid probably being available. None of that may be easy for someone with mental issues to navigate, but that is systematic.

As for the minor extension, is it clear how long she was on leave and what the conversation had been before the termination? The post said that they asked for small time extension, but did not give any indication as to what was happening before, neither length of time employed before taking the leave, what caused the leave, what was said in terms of a return, how long the absence was, etc. I feel like plugging in different answers for those questions would change how I feel about the culpability of the company in the current legal regime.