About That Training Budget

The next time your management complains that your management training budget is too high, perhaps you can show them this New York Times article:

The Lockheed Martin Corporation, the military contractor, has agreed to pay a former employee $2.5 million, more than any person has received in the settlement of a racial discrimination case filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, lawyers for the agency said on Wednesday.

The employee, Charles Daniels, 45, said he was called derogatory names and threatened by four co-workers and a supervisor from 1999 to 2001, when he worked as an aviation electrician for the company in Florida, Hawaii and Washington.

Yeah, because that is so much cheaper than training managers not to do that. I don't know the details of the case, but I imagine it was botched on several levels. People don't generally sue for one comment. They sue when they feel like they have no other option.

When the affected employee took the issue to his manager, he was told:

“That’s just boys being boys, and that’s the way it is here at Lockheed.”

A nice session of Evil HR Lady's Diversity Training Program could have helped that manager realize that that was not the right answer.

I'm definitely cheaper than $2.5 million.