Someone plopped a news release on my desk the other day. It said: "National Labor Relations Board expands Weingarten Right to all employees."
Now, I have never associated my name with anything important. The only famous person with my name was a 19th-century German mathematician wholooked like one of the Smith Brothers cough drop guys and spent his professional life studying "the infinitesimal deformation of surfaces." His work merits 33 words in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the entry fails to mention his first name. It was Julius.
But now comes: The Weingarten Right.
There are few well-known terms that bear people's names, and each is momentous. These terms define critical thought (the Socratic method, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). They save lives (the Caesarean section, the Heimlich maneuver). They explain the physical world (the Doppler effect, Planck's constant). They express national will (the Monroe Doctrine, the Marshall Plan). They dissect human nature (the Peter Principle, Murphy's Law). I could think of only one that actually goes so far as to confer a freedom, and that one is a sacred cornerstone of democracy: Miranda rights.
Excited, I set out to research the Weingarten Right in all its majesty.
It turns out it has been invoked countless times, and has shown up in dozens of cases before the National Labor Relations Board. The first one I encountered involved a factory worker named Luly who got into trouble in the "sludge room":
"While attempting to hide the tool cart of a fellow employee (an admitted act of horseplay) Luly seriously injured a finger . . . "
Hmm. I searched for another.
The next involved a guy accused of ransacking his boss's office, and then rigging a ladder so that when the boss walked in, it fell on him.
Here's one where a woman who worked at a phone company accessed private files to obtain an unlisted number, which then wound up in the hands of her niece, who used it to make harassing phone calls to her estranged husband.
They kept coming: a carnival of flunked drug tests, ludicrous absenteeism, drinking on the job, padding expense accounts, using the S-word and the B-word and the very long and very impolite
M-word while addressing one's supervisor.
The Weingarten Right, it turns out, is a refuge for the office screw-up. Basically, it guarantees you the right to have a witness present when you are suspected of misdeeds and are being grilled by supervisors. It often accompanies a major chewing-out.
The Weingarten Right was birthed in idiocy. It arose from a 1975 case involving an employee at the lunch counter of one of the J. Weingarten chain of grocery stores. This woman was ratted out by a co-worker, who accused her of taking home a $2.98 portion of chicken but only putting $1 in the cash register. The accused chicken thief was hauled into a room and interrogated without a union rep present. When she was able to credibly establish that she had merely put a $1 portion of chicken in a $2.98-size box, she was cleared of wrongdoing and told she could leave. At this point, she burst into tears of gratitude and blurted that the only thing she ever took from the company was free lunches, all the time. Silence. Someone no doubt coughed primly. Then the door was closed and the interrogation proceeded.
Thus was born the Weingarten Right.
Dispirited, I phoned a labor lawyer, who assured me the Weingarten Right is a noble thing, exercised by those accused or suspected of misfeasance, not necessarily by those guilty of misfeasance. Doubtless, it has been used over the years to help innocent people defend themselves against the jackbooted thugs of corporate America.
Encouraged, I went back to the files, searching for nobility.
Here's a promising one. It's very long and complex. There are many legal twists and turns. I'm just getting to the nub of it here.
It turns out a driver at a truck depot was accused of behavior inappropriate to the workplace. A female clerk had asked the drivers what time a certain shipment was going out. The culprit responded to this query by inviting the clerk into the truckers' room "so we can check you out."
Informed by his bosses that this was unacceptable behavior, the offending trucker was invited to attend an instructional seminar on sexual harassment. He agreed to go. When he arrived for his counseling session, he entered the room by the following means:
Kicking the door in.
Yeah, he asserted his Weingarten Right.
Gene Weingarten's e-mail address is weingarten@washpost.com.
