Negligent Hiring

Negligent Hiring

Legal Issues Class

     Negligence is the failure to use “due care” (due diligence) in situations where the legal obligation is to care for other people. If employers do not conduct acceptable and proper reference or back-ground checks, they could unknowingly hire someone whose past history indicates that they could possibility cause danger to the company property or the lives of other employees. In an event like that an employer could defiantly be cited for negligence. Negligence seems to be obvious in situations where employers hire violent employees. Most employers won’t hire applicants they know are dangerous, or unfit for a job. Yet it is the “should have known” portion that gets employers into trouble.

     The risk of being sued for negligent hiring is far from imaginary. Lawsuits for negligent hiring are one of the fastest growing areas for wrongful litigations. Employers can be hit with multimillion dollar jury verdicts and settlements, as well as vast amounts of attorneys’ fees. The companies that do not perform hiring due diligence as part of their standard risk defense procedures, sit as huge targets for legal action. A practice of due diligence also protects an employer in the event a bad hire does slip through. If an employer can persuade a jury that the employer applied due diligence and acted in a reasonable manner, then the employer has a powerful defense against a lawsuit.

    Why is negligent hiring taken so seriously and when did workplace violence really come into play? In August of 1986, a letter carrier walked into an Oklahoma post office and gunned down fourteen of his co-workers before taking his own life. It was that tragedy that brought the nation’s attention to the sad, yet rapidly growing, phenomenon of workplace violence. Stories of workplace mass murders by unstable employees became common for the news and the headlines were unbelievable: "Day-Trader Kills Nine, Then Self in Atlanta's Buckhead Community" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in 1999) "Plant Worker Kills Six at Lockheed Martin Plant in Meridian, Mississippi" (The Meridian Star, in 2003) "Insurance Executive Kills Three at New York City Offices of Blue Cross/Blue Shield" (NY1 News, in 2002) "Four Connecticut State Lottery Workers Killed by Accountant" (The Washington Post, in 1998).

     Workplace violence is still taking place today, in the week of September 28th, 2014 in Alabama a recently fired man walks into a UPS facility he’d worked at and gunned down two people before he took his own life. In Oklahoma another man, also just let go, supposedly headed to his former food processing plant, decapitates a worker, then attacks another. In Illinois police say a man walked into an air traffic control center and started a destructive fire, then slit his own throat. In all three of these occurrences, all from the same week, had very seemingly safe work environments that just changed suddenly into complete danger zones. In most of these cases, dating all the way back to the 1990’s, negligent hiring was the key cause to all of the violence.