Speaker 1: 0:20

Hey, it's Mark and welcome back. I wanted to have a brief episode, essentially an invitation to you, to ask you to provide your own story, your story about your own work, and it's to be done anonymously because we need to protect your. You know who you are, so I'll explain that further. The reason why I'm asking this is that this podcast has episodes that where I'm talking or I'm interviewing colleagues of mine or I'm using legal cases to explain some concept of employment law, because employment law, for some silly reason, is inaccessible to a large measure of people. It's not because I didn't create employment law. You know, I came to it 28 years ago and found it to be archaic in the way it's, you know, it's enforced and the way it's even just described in cases. So the podcast Employee Survival Guide is designed to allow you to. You know, if you had to ask me, the one thing my elevator speech is I want to give you access to employment law concepts in a way that's easy to understand and digest and you can use it.

Speaker 1: 1:44

I get a lot of feedback from people. They write to me and they say that's very, very helpful, and so I'm always thinking about how to produce more information to you in a way that helps you, and one of them is you know to work on and convey stories that people are really going through themselves. So you know employee stories come through maybe an article I read in the paper or something, or some legal case just erupted, or you know they come through that way. But there are hundreds and thousands of employee stories that are out there and they come through court cases, of course. But you can actually help yourselves by sharing your stories, but I have really tight conditions on how you do this, because I want to protect your identities. I don't want to actually know your identities. Your identities will not be known if you participated in this little exercise. I'm not going to share the name of the company, the name of the employee and I'll change the names of everything you give me. But what I'm trying to get at is I want the real story itself that you're experiencing.

Speaker 1: 3:02

That way, you share your story with me, then I share it back with you via the podcast and then I will interpret or provide some type of analysis or discussion about what's happening in a particular story. We can learn from each other by sharing our stories. That's the point, and whether you're willing to do that is up to you, of course. How to do that is really simple. You can simply send me an email and the email address would be mcaryu at capclawcom or capclaw. So mcary at capclawcom it's basically an acronym standing for my law firm, cary Associates PC. And when you send the email, put in the subject line story for podcast and put your cell phone name, cell phone number in there, it's private to me, it's only my email address, no one else can see it and put your email address to be attached to that and then send me your story, your narrative.

Speaker 1: 4:10

I talk I'll probably overstate this, but the power of your narrative is crucial to severance negotiation in legal cases and invite you to write your story about what has happened to you. You can just write it as it has happened. You can use people's names, whatever, but I'm not going to use their names. So I'm going to actually filter it. I'll take your document and your narrative and I'll write over it and cancel out who I'm speaking with. All I'm concerned about is company A did this to employee, employee company, company A, whatever, and I'll just make up a name. So you'll have that, but I'll go into the issues or the conflicts the person's having. Maybe you discuss the concept of hostile work environment, which is. Maybe you discuss the concept of hostile work environment, which is, it seems to be, the hottest issue that most people want to know about. So I just use that by example some form of like a non-compete situation that you've experienced which has a very, you know, detrimental financial impact upon you.

Speaker 1: 5:34

Any story, any story at all, is important. It's going to allow, collectively, us to learn from your story, as I, you know, work through the concepts and figure out whether there are claims there or not, and what it's going to do is going to get you the ability to see the same way I see these cases and whether or not they have a claim or not, because isn't that really the important part of this is that you're listening to a podcast about God. The most boring, effing thing possible is employment law, and you want to learn something. So my job is to make it not boring. My job is to make it real to life, because people are going through these circumstances. Every single day. I get calls. Every day I handle consultations. Every single day, we get hits to our website about people's conflicts. Every single day, hits to our website about people's conflicts every single day. We can't handle them all, but we certainly try to.

Speaker 1: 6:27

But you know, I really encourage you to express in a confidential way your information to be used here on the podcast whereby, collectively, we can learn from what has happened to you. Maybe you yourself will learn. I'm not suggesting you send your case to me to get some free review of it. It's really more about the collective use of your story and I'll change things to make it so. It's not that no one can recognize who you are and who the company is there's no trace back to you but it's the importance of seeing the patterns of behavior that employers go through. I always describe in episodes how employers behave badly in the various patterns. I want you to see the patterns. I want you to see in advance when things start happening to you through these stories, much like those case stories that I share in episodes, where my AI partners produce this dialogue about a case and you are learning from that case what's happened in that particular case, about a concept. I want to do the same thing here with these stories that you're sharing with me. It's almost a sociological experiment, an investigation of what's happening.

Speaker 1: 7:46

Today I'm working on a story that I'll share soon in terms of either my blog or the podcast, but it's employee power. There was a story about a friend of mine in the Wall Street Journal wrote an article with her colleague about employees losing power from where they were before. Now employers are taking it back. I want to hear your story as it's occurring today, and how employers are eroding your power, your ability to enjoy your career, your ability to take a leave of absence for a maternity leave, because that's your right to do that. I just heard a story today that companies fire employees because they take maternity leaves and it's like wait a minute, that's the law. You can't do that. So I want to hear those real life stories that are occurring today, because today we're trying to figure out, you know, where is the employee power? You know, is your story going to help somebody else? I mean, I really have to ask you that. Ask yourself the question do you want to help other people? Now, I'm not trying to unionize, you all it's you know.

Speaker 1: 8:56

I'm trying to educate through providing information and breaking down the barriers to this area called employment law, which you know can be archaic or, you know, designed by, you know, ivory tower people. You know it's. You know, take back control of that concept of employment law. It doesn't belong to companies and corporations, it belongs to you. You're the workforce. You make up employers. Without you, there are no companies. There's no Starlink, there's no Elon Musk, there's no anything about. Without employees.

Speaker 1: 9:31

People don't want to recognize you and so I'm trying to recognize you and your story and, by the way, you can share stories that are both tragic, discriminatory, whatever, but you also can share stories that are how about good stories where people are actually doing the right thing as well? Because we can learn from those positive examples as well. Doing the right thing is really important, but if you listen to my podcast, it's always me chasing after and shaming a company all the time. But there are good stories within all of this. We just don't hear about them because I don't know. That's a good question. Why don't we hear about them? You know, is it newsworthy to hear about doing the right thing at work?

Speaker 1: 10:16

I was thinking about you know a podcast episode or a blog about you know teaching managers how to manage correctly in good conscience, without you know and having the ability to sleep at night when being told to do something to terminate somebody because the higher-ups said so. I mean, you know, companies don't tell employees how to do it correctly, they just tell them, managers, how to fire people. We live in this really Byzantine, archaic world of black and white and employees have power and employees don't have power. That's all intentional. They're designing that dichotomy between the employees and employers for a reason. It gives them leverage and creates fear for employees.

Speaker 1: 11:00

So you can actually do something by sharing your story and share a positive story. I mean and I'll review it, I'll again, I'll make it so you can't figure out who the person is and who the company is. I'll change names, but I want you to exercise that right to. Yes, you can share your story and we can educate each other about these patterns of behavior we see all the time. At least I see them. Maybe you've picked up through listening to the podcast that there are patterns of behavior. If you see them early enough, you can spot them. You can manage them in a way that works out in your favor.

Speaker 1: 11:43

You can actually force an employer to do things you want to do, because that's what I do. You know, given the right set of facts, I can make an employer do a lot of things and we want to have that ability to do that. You know, employers have to make mistakes first, of course, and they do that all the time because they can't manage themselves very well. So you know, my job is essentially to publicly shame them, and I do that. So share your story, be very specific about it. It can be as long as you want it to be. I'll edit it and try to find what is the importance of that story to share with you so we all can collectively learn, because I'm learning every day about new stories, new concepts of what employers do. It's my job. It's why this podcast is important is because I'm doing that. I have this kind of creative interest to learn everything I can about this dysfunctional relationship between employers and employees, and no one else is doing it, and I discovered that recently that no one else is doing that.

Speaker 1: 12:48

Why is that? Why is the area so silent? Why don't more people talk about this like this? I'm not talking about employee engagement. You can have your whole side of that arrangement over there. I'm not talking about employee engagement podcasts or concepts. That's all corporate and consulting stuff of the McKinsey types and I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about you working and talking about enlisting and developing concepts that aid your fellow workers in a way that provides a collective leverage against your employer, not unionization. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about increasing the knowledge base, that when employees become more knowledgeable about their arrangements or push on employers, employers have to adjust. And we've seen the most ideal example of that through the pandemic and I know you watched it, you benefited by it. We're still working through that.

Speaker 1: 13:51

That remote work aspect of quality of life issues. That was the biggest wake-up call for a lot of folks and it's the ability for employees to express and exercise their strength with employers. You know, express and exercise their strength with employers. And the Wall Street Journal recent article was you know, employees losing power, but not everywhere. I mean, you know people still do work remotely all the time and are happy and are productive, which is my colleague's other article that employees are in fact, productive because we know it, we can manage our lives and so we.

Speaker 1: 14:28

I want you to express yourself and help each other to do that through sharing your stories, and if I don't get any responses back, I'll be upset and I'm not going to punish you or anything, but I'm just kidding with you Because you know, if I don't get responses, I'm going to continue to share legal cases with you about people's horrific circumstances and that's, you know, a legal case. Just so you understand it, it's a filtered story narrative about somebody's case because the lawyers and the judges have interacted with the fact pattern in such a way that it's no longer in the conversational tone, it's more of the legalese of a court case and that's how they talk about it. That's why I actually put and used an AI device to interpret cases, to put it in more conversational style, because that's where we're going to learn, instead of if you want to read cases you actually read. The real decision of each case is actually going to be in the show notes for each of those podcasts, but real stories about employees are going to happen, I think, collectively, through a podcast like this, where I will share that story.

Speaker 1: 15:42

Maybe I'll play out the roles, I'll go back to drama class from high school and I'll enact the scene for you and maybe dramatize it in such a way, because people are so used to maybe podcasts doing that or stories. I want to be told a story, but please share your information. I'd be really appreciative if you do that, again through email, only to my email address. It's the only person who's going to see it is myself, and please keep the information private. And I'll do the same. And then I'll change the characters and the name of the companies, whatever and yourself. But I'll need to maybe interact with you via email or by phone, depending upon what's transpiring in the storyline. But the email address, again just so you remember, is mcary at capclawcom, so it's m-c-a-r-e-y at c-a-p-c-l-a-wcom. Please send your stories, looking forward to it, and I'll work very hard to provide the feedback via the narrative story in a podcast episodes to come about.

Speaker 1: 16:50

You, you're the employees that work in this country and you in fact do control what happens in this country. It's just the employers don't want you to know that, so let's be very quiet about that. Why am I whispering? It's just for effect. You get it. Have a great week. Talk to you very soon.