Human Resource Blog

Messengers in Ohio and Safety Issues…or Insubordination?

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We have a messenger company in Ohio. Recently, an employee that regularly delivers for us has started turning down assignment, saying that she thinks they are too dangerous. In such a situation, how should we proceed?

The Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) is a federal act in place in order to ensure that all employees stay healthy and safe while at work. Chances are good that this is a situation that is governed by OSHA, but it may also be a situation where your employee is claiming that she feels unsafe so that she can avoid having to take certain assignments for a variety of reasons.

In order to determine what kind of situation you’re dealing with, it is important that you determine exactly how unsafe the locations are. Does your employee have a legitimate reason for not wanting to go to a particular place, such as it is a high crime area or she is a female in an area where there are dangerous-looking males?

Simply because your employee feels threatened, however, does not give your employee the right to walk off the job or decline certain assignments. If your employee is simply declining the job assignment and claiming that she feels unsafe for no sound reason, it is very possible that she is being insubordinate.

On the occasions, that you have an employee avoiding assignment s because she feels unsafe, it is up to you to determine what the real reason is, if in fact there is another reason. If your worker has a reasonable cause to feel unsafe, then you should listen to her and not force her to take a particular job or assignment if she doesn’t want to. You are not within your right or good judgment to force an employee to take a particular job.

It might be wise to develop a system for determining when a job assignment is unsafe for your messengers. Your line of work does open itself up to a great deal of liability that good paperwork and policies can help to make easier. Be sure that you have a fallback plan for when your female employees do not feel safe in a particular assignment in order to ensure that your business can run smoothly even when your employees enact their rights to safety.