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Must Employees Suing Their Employers Be 'Disgruntled?'

By Bruce Carton

Quick, fill in the blank below: "Disgruntled __________" Did you say "employee?" Of course you did! At the Workplace Prof Blog, Charles Sullivan writes that he can't recall a single case where his clients, who were suing a present or former employer, were not promptly labeled "disgruntled employees" by the defendants. But the term "disgruntled" has a negative connotation, Sullivan says, that goes beyond simply describing an employee with a legal disagreement with an employer. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary defines "disgruntled" as "sulky dissatisfaction," "ill-humour," "chagrin," and "disgust,? which are probably not terms that plaintiffs' counsel would choose to have automatically associated with their client. Sullivan observes that the use of "disgruntled" to describe employees is creeping beyond defense counsel's briefs and into judicial opinions. Some courts, he says, appear to use the term generally to describe any complaint made by an employee, and his quick legal research shows the following: 1004 "disgruntled employees" in Lexis' Federal & State Cases database, as compared to 399 "dissatisfied" employees. With respect to "customers" or "buyers," only 195 are disgruntled, with 593 dissatisfied. Almost no "disgruntled employers" (just 24). Zero "gruntled" employees (just kidding -- I added that one).

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on July 02, 2010 (boomark / email).