Zero Tolerance for Shirley Sherrod

On October 14, 2009, I did a post on the value of zero tolerance policies: 0. The recent firestorm surrounding the forced resignation of Shirley Sherrod by the U.S. Department of Agriculture validates the 10/14/09 post as well as anything possibly could. Most of what has been written about the Sherrod debacle has focused on race and politics. This post focuses on employment and human resources issues. (For a similar post, see Dan Oswald.)

According to a highly edited video of a speech given by Sherrod in March of this year, which was placed on the Internet about a week ago by a political blogger, it appeared that Sherrod, who is black, had made a racist comment about a white farmer. Within a day of the video’s appearance on the Inernet, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack ordered Sherrod to resign. Why? The USDA has a zero toleranace policy for discrimination. Sherrod had made a racist comment. Having zero tolerance for that sort of thing, the USDA ended Sherrod’s career.

In addition to having an ill-advised zero tolerance policy, the USDA did everything else wrong as well. No investigation occurred. Sherrod wasn’t asked for her side of the story. And the coup de grat was that she was forced to resign over the telephone while driving her car. She was told to pull over on the side of the road and send her resignation via Blackberry.

HR 101 has long said this isn’t the way the way to handle a termination. As we know, Sherrod is now a heroine, since the full video of her speech demonstrates she advocated just the opposite of racism, and the USDA is the latest version of the Keystone Kops. Just when we thought that no employer could handle an employment matter so inappropriately, the federal government returned to the rules of 18th century employment with a twist of 21st century technology.