Got a problem employee who you can’t get rid of because of Human Resources bureaucracy, union rules, or state regulation?

Have you considered declaring them mentally ill?

That’s the approach taken by the European Commission in Brussels, where the UK’s Telegraph reports that “the commission’s generous employment terms make it all but impossible to dismiss staff. In the past, employees who have had run-ins with the commission, or simply underperformed, have generally had to be persuaded to leave by offers of expensive early retirement packages.”

The EC found that when the severance package doesn’t work, a finding of mental illness does do the trick.

The prime example: Jose Sequeira, an employee of the Ministry for Development, who, after refusing an offer of early retirement, was found by psychiatrists to suffer from “‘verbal hyper-productivity’ and a ‘lack of conceptual content’ in his speech.” A report said he had signs of “megalomania and paranoia” and another that he “suffers from an astonishing lack of daily awareness in the world of work.”

Sequeira has been placed on permanent sick leave.

We’re surprised that “an astonishing lack of daily awareness in the world of work” seems to be a disqualifier for employment at one of the largest bureaucracies created in the last fifty years, when we would have thought it to be a prerequisite.

The outright bias exhibited by the EC also seems antiquated. The EC fights discrimination “on grounds of sex, race/ethnic origin, religion/belief, disability, age and sexual orientation,” but apparently not on the degree of one’s connection to reality. That seems so last century, doesn’t it?

The good news — there may be domestic applications. Have we finally found a solution to the Ward Churchill tenure problem?

—
Independent tests reportedly found nothing wrong with Mr. Sequeira, although since he’s involved in a lawsuit against his former employers, they may have been commissioned by him.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2005 at 12:09 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Funny ... to us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.