Lawyers on the rampage

[dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)]

Newsday: Wednesday, March 19, 1997

Postal Service Probing E-Mailed Racial Jokes

The U.S. Postal Service is investigating a risque glossary of phony
"ebonics" terms that was sent on the service's electronic mail system. A
postal workers' union labeled the e-mail a "vicious, racist message."

The list of 16 words and their supposed meanings in common parlance
among blacks is rife with sexual and racial stereotypes. It apparently
was sent by a manager in New York using an internal home page.

The list was presented as a tongue-in-cheek guide for managers to
improve communications with office staff. In a letter Friday to
Postmaster General Marvin Runyon, an American Postal Workers Union
official said Runyon's response to the incident should "send a message
to the entire postal community."

"It is a vicious, racist message covered with black humor, and any
rationalization would constitute an insult to those who it is intended
to depict," wrote William Burrus, the union's executive vice president.

A postal official agreed the message was offensive and promised a quick
investigation. "We find the content of this message to be repugnant and
highly offensive," said spokesman Roy Betts. "We have asked the postal
inspection service to immediately get to the bottom of this matter."

Two other major employers -- Morgan Stanley & Co. and Citibank -- were
sued by black employees this year over e-mail messages the employees
said contained racist jokes. The Morgan Stanley employees said the
electronic mailing created a "hostile work environment." Both companies
said they would not tolerate such behavior.

Although the Postal Service message and Burrus' letter both reached
Runyon's office, he said he had not seen them and no action was taken
until postal officials received an inquiry from a news organization late
Monday afternoon.

Betts explained that Runyon was out of the office all last week.

In addition to a stated commitment to diversity in its work force, the
Postal Service has a zero-tolerance policy for racism.

But Angelo Wider, the Postal Service's manager of revenue assurance and
national president of the Afro-American Postal League United for
Success, said: "We still have deep-seated racism in the Postal Service.
It tends to stay in the closet, but every now and then it pops out in
public."

According to Wider, only 10 percent of postal managers are minorities,
while 21 percent of the workers are minorities.

A spokesman for the American Postal Workers Union, Tom Fahey, complained
that the message was symptomatic of an attitude he said pervades Postal
Service management. "We come across communications like this all the
time, Fahey said.

Betts insisted the message "does not reflect the Postal Service's policy
and position."



Washington Post, Thursday, March 20, 1997

E-Mail Humor: Punch Lines Can Carry a Price

By Michelle Singletary

The messages regularly travel between computer screens at workplaces
across the country: Why beer is better than women. Ebonics 101. Top 10
reasons computers must be male.

For many employees e-mail has evolved into a casual electronic
conversation complete with jokes and gossip whether of the politically
correct variety or what could be deemed, particularly in the eyes of
someone of a different race or sex than the sender, as offensive.

Employees typically assume their messages are private and will be seen
only by the recipient. But because messages are routinely saved by
companies, if they end up in the hands of someone for whom they were not
intended, it's often not very funny and ultimately could be used against
the employee and the company in a bias lawsuit. It also creates a
potentially tricky civil-liberties issue for companies that don't want
to monitor employees' e-mail, but don't want to get caught up in a
lawsuit either.

In the past four months, three major U.S. corporations-- R.R. Donnelley
& Sons Co., Morgan Stanley & Co. and Citicorp's Citibank N.A.-- have
been sued by black employees alleging discrimination as a result of
messages sent via e-mail.

Lawyers and technology experts say they believe the suits are the
beginning of a wave of litigation in which employees produce e-mail
evidence of sex, race or age discrimination. Also, lawyers searching for
ways to prove or disprove discrimination routinely are asking companies
to retrieve e-mail from their computer systems.

``Employees have this expectation that e-mail is private, but it's not
and they don't understand that they can leave a footprint,'' said Frank
Connolly, a professor of computer science and information systems at
American University. ``The medium lulls you into a false sense of
security that it probably shouldn't.''

Electronic mail, or e-mail as it is commonly known, is being used by
nearly 80 percent of organizations to communicate and share ideas and
information, according to a survey released last year by the Society for
Human Resource Management. Estimates are that by the year 2000, about 40
million people in the United States will use e-mail, sending more than
60 billion messages annually.

While e-mail quickly has become a common workplace tool, only 36 percgnt
of organizations that use it have written policies addressing its use
and only 34 percent provide training on the proper and improper use of
e-mail, according to the SHRM survey.

Legal and computer experts say e-mail use has added a troubling wrinkle
to workplace discrimination. Such communication has replaced the kind of
informal lunchroom conversations that might have taken place in the
past. In fact, employees have become so comfortable with e-mail that
they say things they never would write in a memo or utter out loud for
fear of being overheard.

And, unlike spoken conversations, e-mail messages are toneless and lack
context, and consequently could be extremely damaging to a company if
used as evidence in court.

``It's one thing to have testimony in court as to an alleged
inappropriate comment made a number of years ago vs. a document where
jurors see it in black and white,'' said Stephen L. Sheinfeld, a New
York attorney who heads the labor and employment department at Whitman
Breed Abbott & Morgan.

Lawyers say workers who electronically send what might be viewed as
racist jokes could be creating what legally is considered a hostile work
environment opening themselves and their companies up to discrimination
lawsuits.

Companies, which often don't have policies on e-mail use and etiquette,
can be liable for their employees' discriminatory actions, experts say,
because legally e-mail sent from work is treated like any official
record, such as a memo written on company letterhead.

``If an executive says something in an e-mail, it's as if he sent it
through a memo,'' according to Jeffrey Neuberger, partner in the New
York law firm of Brown, Raysman & Millstein, Felder & Steiner.

As yet there isn't much case law on this issue. But plaintiffs'
attorneys could show employees were harmed emotionally by being exposed
to racist or sexist e-mail messages. Additionally, e-mail messages also
could be used against companies with spotty or bad histories for hiring
and promoting minorities and women.

``Claimants are now searching the e-mail systems looking for smoking
guns and because e-mail is unerasable, it can come back to haunt an
employer,'' Sheinfeld said.

``There is some really bad, bad stuff being sent,'' said Lauren Reiter
Brody, a partner and co-chair of the employment-practices group at
Rosenman & Colin in New York. One of the companies recently sued, R.R.
Donnelley & Sons, a Chicago printer, is battling a racial-discrimination
lawsuit based in part on 165 racial, ethnic and sexual jokes allegedly
passed through its e-mail system.

Morgan Stanley also has been sued over allegations that racist jokes
were passed between co-workers through the company's e-mail system. And,
last month, Citicorp's Citibank N.A. was sued in a class action in which
two black employees allege that white supervisors and managers exchanged
racist electronic-mail messages.

In the Citibank case, the plaintiffs alleged that because of the
electronic mail, they were subject to a ``pervasively abusive racially
hostile work environment.''

In all three cases, the companies denied wrongdoing and stated they had
taken measures to discipline employees who used the company's e-mail
system inappropriately.

In the Citibank and Morgan Stanley cases, the lawsuits allege that white
managers circulated a list of words that were used in sentences designed
to poke fun at the use of Ebonics, sometimes referred to as black
English.

In one example, submitted as part of the Citibank case, the word
``disappointment'' is capitalized and followed by the sentence: ``My
parole officer tel me if I miss disappointment they gonna send me back
to da big house.''

``This kind of joke without a doubt has no place in the workplace,''
said Stephen T. Mitchell, a Manhattan lawyer representing the two
Citibank employees who filed suit. ``You have a situation that people
that have the power to promote and the power to terminate are ridiculing
people that don't have that power.''

Mitchell said he has been contacted by more than a dozen other Citibank
employees who want to join the lawsuit.

In 1995, Chevron Corp. agreed to pay four women a total of $2.2 million
in settling a sexual-harassment suit after the plaintiffs produced,
among other evidence, e-mail containing sexist jokes about ``why beer is
better than women.''

E-mail humor reaches across gender, racial and ethnic lines. A recent
joke being circulated on the ``Top 10 reasons computers must be male,''
for example, contained as No. 10, ``They have a lot of data but are
still clueless.''

Ultimately, the heightened concern about the liability generated by
e-mail messages will cause more employers to begin monitoring the
electronic mail sent and received by their employees, legal experts
predict.

``I'm getting a lot of inquiries about e-mail monitoring,'' said D.
Michael Underhill, a partner with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a District of
Columbia-based law firm.

Privacy advocates, however, caution employers not to overreact in
responding to possible misuse of e-mail, saying that could cause other
problems to develop.

``Employers shouldn't monitor e-mail unless they have strong reason to
think someone is abusing it,'' said Evan Hendricks, editor of the
Privacy Times.

Legal experts recommend that workplaces have some form of monitoring
e-mail and disclose this to employees. Some experts even suggest that
companies routinely dispose of e-mail messages from backup computer
systems the way they would other sensitive documents. They also say
companies should develop immediately a written policy for e-mail and
provide training on its proper use. Most importantly, such policies
should prohibit the use of offensive language or jokes about race or
sex, they said.

Experts also caution employees of the same race and sex against sending
one another off-color jokes.

Patricia L. Morris, dean of the School of Education and Urban Studies at
Morgan State University, said off-color racial or sexual jokes reinforce
stereotypes. This is especially true for black workers who might be
passing along jokes to one another about Ebonics, for example, at
companies where African Americans are still striving to be paid and
promoted on the same basis as whites.

``We shouldn't accept it from whites and we shouldn't tolerate it at all
from each other,'' Morris said.



USA Today, Thursday, March 20, 1997

Computer-Banking Bugs Turn Off Customers

By Christine Dugas

As more people sign up for computer banking and bill paying, some banks'
systems are becoming overloaded -- causing delays and bounced checks.

The industry says it is experiencing growing pains and is fixing the
problems. But some customers are losing patience.

Richard Rosett, a professor at Rochester (N.Y.) Institute of Technology,
has been disconnected on several occasions while transmitting bill
payments to Chase Manhattan bank.

``The only way to find out if the payments went through was to call
Chase,'' he says. But then he was put on interminable hold. Once he
clocked the wait at more than an hour.

Rosett became more irate when he mistakenly was charged $21.95 in
electronic banking fees. And Chase didn't respond to his electronic mail
complaint, he says. So, he's taking his business elsewhere.

Chase, the USA's largest bank, isn't the only financial institution with
problems. ``Banks are victims of their own success,'' says Bill Burnham,
a banking consultant at Booz, Allen & Hamilton.

Since NationsBank launched its personal computer banking service a year
ago, 320,000 customers have signed on. ``We were able to keep up with
the growth until recently,'' says Smita Quinn, PC banking manager. Then
customers encountered connection delays.

They sometimes had to wait up to 10 minutes to speak to a bank
representative by phone. So NationsBank curtailed its marketing push and
beefed up its call center staff.

Chase says it also is increasing its phone staff -- from 50 people to
150 by the end of April. Ed Valenski, senior vice president in charge of
the call center, says Chase tries to resolve problems, but many are
beyond its control.

That's because Intuit Services handles payment processing and other
computer services for about 40 banks, including Chase. Connection delays
and service interruptions cropped up because the company couldn't handle
the growing volume. Intuit Services recently was sold to CheckFree, a
large national payment processor, which says it now has ironed out the
problems.

But it was too late to help Pam Toner of Fairfield, Conn. Toner says her
August home-equity loan payment didn't go through because of a glitch in
Chase's PC banking service. And the late payment ended up on the Toners'
credit report.

Now Chase is trying to clear up the mess by writing the credit agency.
To make up for such problems, the bank has sent some customers flowers.
But Toner didn't get any.

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<a href="mailto:dlv@bwalk.dm.com">Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM</a>
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps