Legal Question in Employment Law in New Jersey

Re: Boss is unethical

If you report unethical or illegal behavior, you should be aware that New Jersey has a statute that protects �whistle-blowers� from retaliation by employers. The Conscientious Employee Protection Act, (�CEPA�) N.J.S.A. 34:19-1 et seq. is intended to protect and encourage employees to report illegal or unethical workplace activities and to discourage public and private sector employers from engaging in such conduct. A �whistle-blower� is generally defined as an employee who refuses to engage in and/or reports illegal or wrongful activities of his employer or fellow employees. CEPA is remedial legislation enacted to provide protection for workers who may be subjected to retaliatory actions by their employers if they reveal �corrupt, illegal, fraudulent, or harmful activity� by their employers. In order to establish a under CEPA, an employee must prove that a causal connection exists between the whistle-blowing activity and the adverse employment action, and that the employer�s conduct violates a clear mandate of public policy. The protections of CEPA are available to the employee, though, only if the employee brings the unlawful activity, policy or practice to the attention of the employer, and provides the employer with a reasonable opportunity to correct the unlawful activity, policy or practice. It should be noted that filing a complaint does not insulate the complaining employee from discharge or other disciplinary action unrelated to the complaint.

Re: Boss is unethical

I can't give you a definitive answer but I can give you some insights that may help.

1. Be sure of your facts before deciding for yourself what is ethical or not. When I started working in the defense industry, almost everything was direct charged to a customer account. Those of us who worked overhead-like activities just split the charges among the contracts that we worked. The customer knew about this and expected it. It was an accepted practice and there was no mischarging. Today, accounting standards have changed. Overhead-like activities that benefit more than one contract are charged to an indirect account and divvied up as overhead later. On the other hand, the customer expects and pays a much higher contribution for overhead. So, the real question is whether your charges are consistent with accepted standards that both your company and its customers have agreed to. If you don't know the answer to that question, you should ask before you accuse anyone of being unethical and before you jump ship. You may not know all of the facts. Tell your boss that you feel uncomfortable about what you are being told to do and listen to the answer. If you learn something, perhaps that will help.

2. That said, it is a fact of life that anyone can be ethical if it doesn't hurt. All real world ethics problems come with a bite. Whether or not you can collect unemployment should be absolutely irrelevant to your decision. You should refuse to participate in unlawful or unethical conduct without regard to the consequences to you. Bad conduct is not any less wrong because avoiding it has unpleasant side effects.

If you try your best to become fully informed and if you do what you firmly believe is the right thing, it will be so much easier for your lawyer to make a case for you if it should come to that. More importantly, win or lose, you will be able to sleep well.

See also: http://info.corbettlaw.net/lawguru.htm