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A federal jury has concluded that an Atlanta grocery warehousing firm must pay two employees a combined $2.2 million for forcing them to submit to a buccal cheek swab to determine if their DNA was a match to excreta being left throughout the facility.
Employees Jack Lowe and Dennis Reynolds declined a combined $200,000 settlement offer from Atlas Logistics Group Retail Services. Instead, they forged ahead with the first damages trial resulting from 2008 civil rights legislation that generally bars employers from using individuals' "genetic information" when making hiring, firing, job placement, or promotion decisions.
Atlas Logistics claimed the "genetic information" at issue wasn't covered by the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). Atlas Logistics asserted that GINA excludes analyses of DNA, RNA, chromosomes, proteins, or metabolites if such analyses do not reveal an individual's propensity for disease.
US District Judge Amy Totenberg, however, refused to toss the case, which she described as the search for the "devious defecator" who left "offending fecal matter" across the Atlanta-area warehouse that sorted and delivered products for grocery stores. The judge ruled that the "plain meaning of the statute's text" is satisfactory for the case to go forward despite the tests at issue not revealing disease propensities.
Original Submission
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2015, @04:18AM
at Company Demands DNA Swabs From Employees During Hunt for Rogue Pooper [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by hankwang on Saturday June 27 2015, @10:50AM
The previous story links to a google webcache which is defunct now. Here is the actual ruling from May 5th: http://hr.cch.com/ELD/LoweAtlas.pdf [cch.com] .
It mentions a few facts that were not mentioned in TFA: "Beginning in 2012, an unknown number of Atlas employees began defecating in Atlas’s Bouldercrest Warehouse. The
defecations occurred numerous times and necessitated the destruction of grocery products on at least one occasion." Maybe it's not relevant to the matter whether the DNA analysis was legal or not, but it makes clear that it was not a single incident.
The DNA test cleared the two employees of suspicions. I wonder whether they would have sued the employer if it turned out that they actually were the mystery poopers...
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