Dear Boss: You’re a jerk; see you in court

Bosses are really mean these days, or employees are really thin-skinned.

Lawmakers across the U.S. are considering legislation that would give workers grounds to sue their superiors for being, basically, jerks. Bookstores are stocking bad-boss advice tomes, including “Snakes in Suits” and “Was Your Boss Raised by Wolves?” The AFL-CIO even has an online contest that takes entries for the worst boss in the country.

Are relations between workers and management really in such an awful state?

Maybe. The ranks of bullying bosses are growing, some experts contend, as short-staffed companies tap managers with lousy people skills. Others point out that though mean and dimwitted supervisors have been around since work was invented, baby boomers on the cusp of retirement and restless younger employees are more likely to complain or quit than suffer in silence. It’s easy to decide against taking the latter tack, thanks to the proliferation of venting Web sites, among them www.ebosswatch.com.

The AFL-CIO, not surprisingly, puts the blame on management’s shoulders. Sure, there have always been bullying bosses, said Karen Nussbaum, executive director of the union’s Working America lobbying arm, but today some of them “don’t even have good manners anymore.”

If that doesn’t sound like grounds for a lawsuit, at least four state legislatures are thinking about making it so.

A bill in New Jersey would give an individual the right to seek as much as $25,000 in damages if an employer created “an abusive work environment.” Similar measures are pending in New York state, Vermont and Washington state. In California, a group called California Healthy Workplace Advocates is working to revive a sue-the-boss bill that died in committee in 2003.

The bills are short on specifics, such as what exactly would constitute an abusive work environment, and their prospects are far from certain. The wisdom of giving employees new grounds to sue is debatable, considering the threat of frivolous court-clogging suits and laws at the federal level and in many states that already protect people against, among other things, sexual harassment and discrimination based on gender, race, pregnancy, physical disability and religion.

But New Jersey Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein, a Democrat, said she was committed to seeing the Healthy Workplace Act, which she’s sponsoring, become law. People need protection, she said, if they can’t afford to quit and therefore “have to stay and put up with poor treatment.”

Jumping on the bandwagon, the AFL-CIO launched the My Bad Boss contest, now in it second year, to “expose what is a growing problem,” Nussbaum said, and to give workers an opportunity to get their bad-boss experiences “off their chests.”

Last year’s winning entry was “Dr. X,” a dentist who took $100 out of each employee’s paycheck for every canceled appointment.

The contestants, all anonymous, tell many horror stories.

One of the hundreds posted is about a lawyer who called the office every morning to give instructions as he brushed his teeth and conducted other business in his bathroom; another is about a manager who refused to let an employee whose husband had a brain tumor take a day off unless she provided a note from a doctor.

The contestant “Momtimesfour” recounts the day her boss offered to buy everyone in the office lunch and took them to a discount warehouse, where he instructed them to dine on free samples in the grocery section.

“Melanie” from Alabama, a cancer patient who lost her hair as a result of chemotherapy, says she overheard her boss making fun of how she looked with a bald pate. And a pregnant pizzeria worker says her manager ordered her to complete her shift after she had gone into labor. “I stayed and waited on customers,” she says, “and made pizzas between contractions.”