Thwarting of Job Duties

[Averily]

I am the Chief Information Officer of a large non-profit corporation. My title has not been accompanied with the support or acknowledgement of my company. A long employed secretary has more influence on the company's information operations than I have. My supervisor, the CEO and his second in command, the COO are notoriously anti-technology. Therefore, they prefer to deal with their friend, the secretary, than with me.

We have horrible business practices that I am very capable of fixing. I have tried to warn my boss, make changes, implement projects and move forward but I have been thwarted every time. The most common thwart is to ingnore me. This has gone on for the two years I have been in office. Our bad practices have caught up with us to the extent that our largest customer has 'dictated' that we hire a business analyst of their choice to fix our business operations. He will have access to my staff, who have also been dedicated for the analyst's work. I have been relegated to the role of 'management liason'.

This effectively sets me aside. It will likely lead to my lead employee having more access to new processes and staff than I do and effectively make me worthless at my workplace and therefore lead to layoff.

My question is do I have any recourse?

The current situation was caused by my supervisor and his second in command, the COO. I am aware that the COO was not in favor of my appointment two years ago and made several comments to that effect. I cannot possibly be effective without his support and my resulting failure is a direct result of that. I don't know why he never gave me a chance. He has never complained to me or suggested anything for improvement. I am of ethnic decent. It is possible that he has a race problem with me but I cannot be sure.

 

[cbg]

No, you have no recourse. It is not illegal for them to ignore you. If that results in your job being eliminated, that will just be one more bad job practice. In other words, this falls into the "possibly unfair but not illegal" category.

As far as the race issue goes, at least initially the burden of proof would be on you to show that you had suffered adverse treatment BECAUSE OF your race. Since you yourself are not even certain that race is involved, that's not a card you really want to play.

 

[Averily]

Thanks cbg, unfortunately, I was afraid I was going to get that reply.

My company is a "show cause" company. Assuming no cause can be shown, can my company let me go and possibly replace me with an underling?

Can they engineer a restructuring that effectively eliminates my department yet selectively transfer jobs and responsibility elsewhere to sidestep the cause issue?

 

[Beth3]

"My company is a "show cause" company. Assuming no cause can be shown, can my company let me go and possibly replace me with an underling?"
"Show cause"? Unless you have an employment contract with the employer or their handbook waives their "at will" perogatives, you are an "at will" employee, even if company practice has been only to terminate people for misconduct, job elimination, etc. (which is the practice of the vast majority of employers; most companies don't fire people on a whim.) If they feel the need to have cause, I'm sure they can come up with something plausible though: "failure to effectively influence the organization," "failure to implement appropriate IT programs," etc. It doens't matter if it's not your fault that that hasn't happened.

"Can they engineer a restructuring that effectively eliminates my department yet selectively transfer jobs and responsibility elsewhere to sidestep the cause issue?" Sure.

Yours is unfortunately not the first company to go to the expense of hiring a senior manager and then not allow him/her to do their job because of some internal "political" issue. You just don't have any legal issues here.

What you need to do is start looking for a new job right away. Good luck.

 

[Averily]

Thanks Beth3.

Yes, "show cause" is embossed in written policy. We agreed to it in order to avoid a union organization effort.

 

[Beth3]

That explains things but they can presumably come up with something that constitutes "cause," although I don't know how (or if) that term is defined in the handbook.