Covid_19 > Arbitrator awards 40 fired health-care workers termination and severance pay

 

Arbitrator Awards Compensation to Toronto Health-Care

Workers Dismissed for Refusing COVID Vaccine

An Ontario arbitrator has awarded termination and severance pay to 40 Toronto health-care workers who were fired for refusing COVID-19 vaccination.

Arbitrator John Stout made the decision in a case involving the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 145 and the William Osler Health System (WOHS).

Stout said in his decision released Aug. 12 that although the hospital’s 2021 COVID-19 vaccination policy was technically lawful, his ruling considered the fact that the health-care workers didn’t act out of “malicious intent” when refusing vaccination.

“I find that the individual grievors who were terminated from their employment by the Hospital are entitled to termination and severance pursuant to the ESA. Specifically, an individual’s refusal to become vaccinated, in the circumstances at this workplace, does not amount to ‘willful misconduct, disobedience or willful neglect of duty,’” said the ruling.

The case included 82 individuals who filed grievances over being suspended or terminated for failing to comply with the hospital’s vaccination policy, according to the decision.

WOHS had argued that the workers were terminated “with cause,” and not entitled to termination or severance pay under the Employment Standards Act (ESA).

A policy was put in place on Nov. 7, 2021, that stated all WOHS hospital employees were required to have two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Workers who did not comply were put on unpaid suspension or disciplinary termination, the arbitration document says. A total of 42 healthcare workers were suspended and 40 were fired.

The decision follows a similar outcome involving a case of nine Ontario nurses who were terminated for not receiving COVID-19 vaccination. In March, an arbitrator ruled their termination unreasonable, and said they should be reinstated.

The arbitrator in the case, James Hayes, said that the hospital acted reasonably by putting a vaccine policy in place. However, he said the nurses should have been placed on unpaid leaves of absence rather than fired for not complying with the hospital policy.

At the end of May, another arbitrator ruled that a London, Ont., nurse who was fired by the London Health Sciences Centre in Oct. 2021 for not being vaccinated should be reinstated.

Arbitrator Mark Wright said that while the union conceded the vaccine policy enacted by the health-care facility was reasonable, the nurse’s termination “lacked just cause.”

Nurse Jill Thompson, who was a child and youth counsellor at a children’s hospital, was fired on Oct. 22, 2021, for not complying with a mandatory vaccine policy that had been in place since Aug. 31, 2021.

Wright also directed that on Thompson’s employee file, the discharge be changed to a 30-day disciplinary suspension.

Approaching Sodom > PSU Abandons Search for Truth; Professor Fired for Not Being Racist; de Blasio Kills Gifted Student Program

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Portland State University Professor Resigns, Says School Is a

‘Social Justice Factory’

Peter Boghossian, assistant professor at Portland State University and co-author of “How to Have Impossible Conversations.” 

BY JACK PHILLIPS September 8, 2021

Portland State University professor Peter Boghossian said he’s resigned from his position in an open letter and accused the college administration of creating an environment that imperils dissent.

“I never once believed—nor do I now—that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion,” Boghossian, a philosophy professor, wrote in the letter. “Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.”

But over time, he argued, Portland State University—a publicly-funded college—made “intellectual exploration impossible” and has transformed itself into a “social justice factory” with a primary focus on race, victimhood, and gender.

“Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues,” said the letter, which was published on Bari Weiss’s Substack page. Weiss herself previously worked for the New York Times until 2020 when she resigned, accusing her Times colleagues of bullying, and argued that the paper capitulated to Twitter-based pressure campaigns.

Editor Resigns, Leaves Scathing Indictment of New York Times

Portland State University

“Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions,” Boghossian added. “This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.”

Later in his letter, Boghossian said that over time, he faced retaliation for speaking out against academia’s narratives around race, gender, and social justice.

“For me, the years that followed were marked by continued harassment. I’d find flyers around campus of me with a Pinocchio nose. I was spit on and threatened by passersby while walking to class. I was informed by students that my colleagues were telling them to avoid my classes,” he wrote.

The lecturer added: “And, of course, I was subjected to more investigation. I wish I could say that what I am describing hasn’t taken a personal toll. But it has taken exactly the toll it was intended to: an increasingly intolerable working life and without the protection of tenure.”

Years ago, Boghossian drew headlines when he and two other authors submitted bogus race, gender, sexuality, and cultural studies to academic journals to see whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication.

Many of these papers were subsequently published, which Boghossian and the others suggested was due to lackadaisical criteria and institutional rot in several academic fields.

Madness: UCLA Suspends Professor for Refusing to Assign Grades

Based on Skin Color

OCT 6, 2021 7:00 PM 

BY ROBERT SPENCER

My latest in PJ Media:

This is the state of American academia today: Gordon Klein has taught courses in business law, tax law, and financial analysis at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management for no fewer than forty years. He is a respected academic who has been on CNBC and quoted in the Wall Street Journal for his economic expertise. But now, after being suspended, he has filed suit in California Superior Court against the university regents over his suspension. Klein has a good case: He was suspended from teaching at UCLA for the crime of refusing to discriminate and treat his black students differently from how he treated others.

“I was suspended from my job,” Klein explained, “for refusing to treat my black students as lesser than their non-black peers.” His ordeal began on June 2, 2020, when “a non-black student in my class on tax principles and law emailed me to ask that I grade his black classmates with greater ‘leniency’ than others in the class.”

In a sane society, a “non-black student” who demanded that black students be graded with greater “leniency” than others would be castigated as a racist. But in the Left’s funhouse mirror ethics, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and treating students differently based on race is racial justice.

The student wrote to Klein: “We are writing to express our tremendous concern about the impact that this final exam and project will have on the mental and physical health of our Black classmates.” Klein believes that the student was using an online racial justice form letter: “There was no project in this class, and it was unclear to me who the ‘we’ in this case was. I suspected the student simply used a form letter he found online and neglected to change the subject.”

The letter went on to claim that black students were too traumatized by racism to do well on the final exam: “The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community. As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.” It concluded: “This is not a joint effort to get finals canceled for non-Black students, but rather an ask that you exercise compassion and leniency with Black students in our major.”

Klein notes that “in a subsequent conversation with a university investigator,” the student who wrote the letter made it clear that he “intended that the requested adjustments apply to Black students and not the class generally.” To strengthen the case, the student invoked the Anderson School of Management’s “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” agenda, which stresses that a “commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion as fundamental to achieving Anderson’s mission.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

‘A falling tide lowers all ships’: NY Mayor de Blasio hammered

for scrapping gifted education programs in the name of ‘equity’

8 Oct, 2021 18:07

FILE PHOTO: Bill de Blasio greets a student on his first day of pre-school in the Queens borough of

New York City, September 21, 2020 © Reuters / Brendan McDermid

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio will scrap the city’s gifted and talented program, which critics say discriminates against black and Hispanic students. However, the mayor was accused of dumbing down his schools to appear woke.

“The era of judging four-year-olds based on a single test is over,” de Blasio said on Friday, announcing that New York’s ‘Gifted and Talented’ test, administered to kids leaving kindergarten to sort out the brightest students for admission to more selective middle and high schools, would be phased out from next year onwards.

In its place, de Blasio is introducing ‘Brilliant NYC’, a “new and equitable” program where promising children aged eight and up will receive special lessons while in class alongside their less gifted peers. Rather than establishing eligibility by test, the new system will take on board feedback from teachers and continuous assessment, the New York Times reported.

The move is a direct response to critics who have called the ‘Gifted and Talented’ program racist. Though students of all races are allowed to take the test and pursue Gifted and Talented education, “about 75 percent of the roughly 16,000 students in gifted elementary school classes in New York are white or Asian American,” the New York Times noted. Splitting education by intelligence in this manner has resulted in New York having “one of the most racially segregated school systems in the country,” the paper added.

De Blasio won’t be overseeing the transition to ‘Brilliant NYC’. The mayor’s term expires at the end of this year, and managing the new program will fall on his successor. Eric Adams, a black Democrat widely tipped to win November’s election, is in favor of keeping the Gifted and Talented system, but increasing access to it in lower income neighborhoods. This plan reportedly has the backing of many black and latino parents who want to give their kids a leg up.

Asian American parents, represented by a number of their co-ethnic lawmakers, also want to keep the elite programs in place. “Gifted and talented programs have been an integral option for generations of schoolkids,” State Senator John C. Liu tweeted on Friday, adding that de Blasio’s “total elimination” of these programs “won’t help his abysmal record.”

De Blasio’s decision caught national attention, with pundits and commenters accusing the Democrat mayor of hampering gifted children’s prospects to score points with the “woke.”

“The gifted children in our public schools shouldn't be abandoned in the name of far left woke speak,” one left-wing Twitter user posted. “Don't kneecap the critical thinkers to promote some arbitrary ‘fairness.’”

Switching over to the new program presents numerous challenges for New York. For one thing, all of the city’s 4,000 or so kindergarten teachers will need to be trained “to accommodate students who need accelerated learning within their general education classrooms,” per the New York Times.

This training will cost tens of millions of dollars, and city authorities face the daunting task of ensuring that every single teacher – some of whom don’t even have to pass a literacy exam – can differentiate between students of differing abilities and teach them appropriately in the same classroom. Furthermore, schools that exist exclusively to serve gifted children will now need to be repurposed, and no clear plan has emerged on how to do this. 

With all of these factors in play, Adams, if successful in November, might be tempted to ignore the woke and simply undo de Blasio’s decision with the stroke of a pen.

The Bizarre Corruption Scandal at Bilfinger

Corruption is Everywhere - in Germany for sure

Bilfinger, one of Germany's best-known construction firms, pledged to clean up its global business practices as it pivoted to the oil sector. But when an investigator began digging into one of the company's deals in the Middle East, she suddenly fell ill - and things only got stranger from there.

By Rafael Buschmann, Jürgen Dahlkamp, Gunther Latsch and Jörg Schmitt; Der Speigel

Bilfinger has long been plagued by accusations of corruption.

In January 2017, Marie-Alexandra von Sachsen-Meiningen flew to the Persian Gulf. As "head of investigations" for the industrial construction company Bilfinger SE, she had deep insight into the firm, and was driven by a potentially dangerous curiosity to learn even more. Particularly about the muck left over from dirty deals in all corners of the world. Her job was to clear up cases of suspected corruption, to protect Bilfinger. What she didn't know was that her trip to the Gulf would be her last business trip on behalf of the company. And potentially the last one of her career.

Bilfinger was struggling for survival, and a man named Tom Blades had been charged with leading the company into a more promising future in the oil and natural gas industry. Blades, who was British, had significant experience in the oil industry and, after churning through four CEOs in just two years, including the former governor of the German state of Hesse, Roland Koch, he was considered the company's last hope.

His vision involved transforming Bilfinger from a construction company of 70,000 employees - a company that built the Olympic Stadium in Munich along with myriad bridges, tunnels and dams the world over - into a technical services provider for industry. He envisioned the new Bilfinger as a company focused on keeping factories running, and monitoring and repairing them as needed. One area of operations was the oil fields in the Middle East, a region where bribery is the rule rather than the exception.

Blades badly needed a quick win in the region, and a huge contract was in the offing in Oman.

In January of 2017, Marie-Alix von Meiningen was also headed for Oman. The head of the Bilfinger subsidiary in the country, a man who had landed one large deal after the other in the country, had disappeared without a trace and hadn't been seen for months. His disappearance had raised some uncomfortable questions: Had he been involved in bribery? Had all of Bilfinger's deals in Oman been bought?

Fired

But Meiningen never made it to Oman. She landed in Abu Dhabi, the first stop on her itinerary, and met up with a colleague who provided tea for the meeting. A short time later, she began feeling unwell and headed back to her hotel, where she spent the next three days suffering from hallucinations and high fever. She vomited blood, had trouble breathing and fainted repeatedly, as she would later tell friends.

She somehow made it back to Europe but was never able to resume her Oman investigation. On March 9, 2017, she was summarily fired, allegedly because she had hired private investigators in Oman and elsewhere without strictly following company regulations. The company had hired a lawyer specifically to find something, anything, that could be held against her.

Just six days after she was unceremoniously chucked out of the company, Blades finally announced the big deal he had been working on: an agreement with Petroleum Development Oman LLC extending Bilfinger's maintenance deal for an oil field in the country's north by three years. The contract was worth 200 million euros ($230 million). "The order confirms our new strategy: The Middle East is a growth market with potential for us," Blades said in a company press release. He must also have welcomed what the influential German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: "The contract signifies the dawning of a new era. Many observers had doubted that Blades would be able to change course."

There is much more to this story. It can be found here.

Science and Christianity - Who's Side is the Truth on?

University settles lawsuit with scientist fired after he found

soft tissue in dinosaur bones

By Chad Dou —

CSUN scientist Mark Armitage found soft tissue in a dinosaur bone, a discovery that throws significant doubt on evolution. Then, two weeks after publishing his findings, he was fired.

Now California State University at Northridge has paid Armitage a six-figure sum to settle his wrongful termination suit based on religious discrimination. While the university admits no wrongdoing, Armitage’s attorney said they feared losing a protracted lawsuit because of a “smoking gun” email that backed the plaintiff’s case.

The case of Armitage is the latest to show the mounting hostility Christians face in academics and other public arenas.

A Triceratops

“Soft tissue in dinosaur bones destroys ‘deep time.’ Dinosaur bones cannot be old if they’re full of soft tissue,” Armitage said in a YouTube video. “Deep time is the linchpin of evolution. If you don’t have deep time, you don’t have evolution. The whole discussion of evolution ends if you show that the earth is young. You can just erase evolution off the whiteboard because of soft tissue in dinosaur bones.”

Armitage was hired as a microscopist to manage CSUN’s electron and confocal microscope suite in 2010. He had published some 30 articles in scientific journals about his specialty.

A graduate of Liberty University, Armitage adheres to the “young earth” view,  against the majority of scientists who say our planet is 5 billion years old. He engaged students in his lab with Socratic dialogue over the issue of the earth’s age based on his and others’ research, he said.

In May 2012, Armitage went on a dinosaur dig at the famous fossil site of Hell Creek in Montana, where he unearthed the largest triceratops horn ever found there. Back at CSUN, he put the fossil under his microscope and made the startling discovery: unfossilized, undecayed tissue was present.

If the dinosaur were 65 million years old, the soft tissue could not have possibly remained, he says. His findings seconded groundbreaking discoveries by noted molecular paleontologist Mary Schweitzer, who triggered an earthquake in the world of paleontology when she published about soft tissue in dinosaur bones in 2005. (Schweitzer subsequently postulated that iron is responsible for preserving the soft tissue.)

Armitage’s February 2013 study was published in the peer-reviewed Acta Histochemica, a journal of cell and tissue research. Two week later, he found himself without a job.

A biology professor had come into his office and said, “We are not going to tolerate your religion in this department.”

Armitage fought back. Professors and students alike had praised his work managing the microscope lab. His suit alleged he was excluded from a secret meetings of the microscopy committee. In a “smoking gun” email, university officials suggested they could ease Armitage out of his part-time position by making it full-time, Reinach said.

A colleague described the process as a “witch hunt,” according to Inside Higher Ed.

For two years, CSUN fought Armitage’s lawsuit. The university alleged his firing was simply a restructuring of their biology department and not a case of religious discrimination. But CSUN lost its bid to have the judge summarily throw the case out of court as groundless in July of last year.

So CSUN settled with Armitage for $399,500 in 2016, according to Inside Higher Ed.

Alan Reinach, Armitage’s attorney, hailed the settlement as precedent-setting.

“We are not aware of any other cases where a creationist received a favorable outcome,” said Reinach, executive director of the Church State Council, a nonprofit California public interest legal organization. “This was truly a historic case.”

CSUN has downplayed its decision to settle, saying in a statement that the university is committed to religious freedom and freedom of speech.

“The Superior Court did not rule on the merits of Mr. Armitage’s complaint, and this voluntary settlement is not an indication of wrong-doing,” according to a CSUN statement published in Retraction Watch. “The decision to settle was based on a desire to avoid the costs involved in a protracted legal battle, including manpower, time and state dollars.”

But Reinach countered: “They certainly would not have paid that kind of money if they did not recognize that we had them dead to rights. The state doesn’t put large, six-figure settlement money out unless they are really concerned they are going to lose.”

Prior to looking for soft tissue in dinosaur bones, Armitage studied diatoms, unicellular organisms that make up phytoplankton, which reveal a dizzying complexity and organization at the microscopic level.

According to Armitage, the beauty and complexity of diatoms lends credence to the idea they are a product of a Creator and not of spontaneous evolution.

“Evolution is structure supported by two pillars: one is chance, and the other is time. Chance is required because we obviously can’t say that a thinking force created life on earth. That is anathema for the materialists. If you kick out one of those two pillars the whole structure collapses,” Armitage noted. “If you kick out chance by showing incredible design, the structure of evolution starts to totter and it may crash. Because you cannot have design in a world that doesn’t have a Designer.

“The other pillar is time because you cannot get a man from a frog unless the princess kissed the frog. That’s a fairy tale. So in science you have to have deep time to get evolution.”

Subsequent to the controversy, Armitage has been on additional digs and found more soft tissue but is finding it difficult to get published. “I’m clearly being blackballed,” he said in The College Fix.

“Soft tissue in dinosaur bones destroys deep time.” Armitage said. “Dinosaur bones cannot be old if they’re full of soft tissue.”