25th Apr 2008
Spirituality at Work Roundup
Getting Divorced? Lose Job too Ken Gramm, a faculty member at Wheaton in Illinois, is getting a divorce and chose to voluntarily leave Wheaton rather than be terminated:
Wheaton, a non-denominational evangelical Protestant college, maintains a strong commitment to its statement of faith and community covenant, the latter a social compact based on biblical standards for Christian character and behavior. Wheaton’s long-standing policy on divorced employees stems directly from those two documents, the provost, Stan Jones, says.
“The college has uniformly emphasized the biblical expectation of marriage to be permanent, a picture of our relationship (the bride) to Christ (the bridegroom),” Wheaton’s policy reads.
I am surprised Wheaton can actually staff a campus with such policies. But perhaps I know more divorced people than most.
Seabury-Western Theological Seminary Lays Off Tenured Faculty So much for tenure, eh? That pretty much says it all. Apparently the residential MDiv program is no more. Not a lot of good news recently in the land of cash-strapped Episcopal seminaries.
The Workplace Prof Blog Ponders the Supposed Abuse of FMLA I’ve been wondering about this too. It’s unpaid leave. I suppose it could be abused, but I find it hard to believe it’s abused as much as employers say it is.
I saw abuse of FMLA sometimes in my former workplace, but it always came down to the managers, and how well they enforced policies already in place. If anything, I saw more people who didn’t use it when they were entitled to (not wanting to bother with paperwork, or explaining personal issues to supervisors), than people who did use it for things that were questionable.
I wish that employers would hold managers more responsible instead of just trying to make the laws more restrictive. Also, the more stressful the work environment, the more you are going to have employees with stress related illnesses. Stress is like smoking - it just universally exacerbates every health problem known to humankind. BTW, out of several hundred people in an office where I used to work, the absolute worst “abusers” of FMLA from my perspective were a handful of those in managerial or leadership positions. Not upper management, but lower management. Kind of hard to keep track of other people, if you’re never at work at yourself.
FMLA is such a complicated system that one must almost be a scholar to understand the ends and outs.
That’s the problem, pure and simple. The ill-educated often end up compromised by a system that they do not understand and do not know how to work for their own benefit.
For the most part, everyone I have ever worked with is under the impression that FMLA is for long-term absences and requires a doctor’s note. Or maybe that’s just been the company policy. I’ve certainly never seen abuse of it, but then I’ve never worked in a place that didn’t provide ample sick days.
“I am surprised Wheaton can actually staff a campus with such policies.”
I’m surprised too! Especially since the studies I’ve seen show that divorce rates among evangelicals are no lower than among the general population.