The co-workers - one black, one white - say the message did not offend them.
By LEONORA LaPETER
Published May 27, 2003
ST. PETERSBURG - The e-mail that ended Lisa Spangler's career at Bayfront Medical Center arrived at 1:28 p.m. on April 23.
Spangler, a patient financial services coordinator at the St. Petersburg hospital, opened it and then clicked on the attachment, a "ghetto resume" of a fictional African-American woman. Written in dialect, it listed skills, education and work experience, making jokes based on ethnic stereotypes.
The e-mail was sent by a Bayfront co-worker, Brenda Gulley, who is black. Spangler, who is white, said it made her laugh. She decided she would take it to her husband, so she printed it out and put it in her purse. Then she went over to the hospital's emergency room to work an evening shift.
Now Spangler and Gulley have lost their jobs over the exchange in an outcome that is becoming more common in the business world. Bayfront also fired another employee this past month in an unrelated "computer misconduct" incident, which officials declined to describe.
Spangler, a nine-year Bayfront employee and the sole supporter of her stay-at-home husband and two children, said the punishment was excessive.
"I shouldn't have been fired," said Spangler, 44, who can't talk about the incident without crying. "I felt like the sacrificial lamb."
Bayfront's firing of Spangler and Gulley is one in a long series of firings over e-mail transmissions in corporate America.
In 1999, the New York Times Co. fired 20 employees at a Virginia payroll center for exchanging "inappropriate and offensive" electronic messages. That same year, the St. Louis-based Edward Jones fired some two-dozen employees and suspended another 48 for using e-mail for nonbusiness purposes. Dow Jones Chemical fired 24 workers and reprimanded another 235 in 2000 after uncovering the e-mail exchange of inappropriate jokes, nude pictures and photos of car wrecks.
Spangler, whose last two annual evaluations were positive, said her case is different. She claims she never gave the e-mail to anyone. She contends she is a victim of office politics involving a bid for a supervisory position in the emergency room.
Bayfront officials said three employees complained, one in writing, that "another employee had distributed offensive material," said Bill Hervey, a spokesman for Bayfront. He said Bayfront fired two employees for violating the hospital's anti-discrimination policy after a two-day investigation.
"At Bayfront, when it comes to harassment, either sexual harassment or discrimination based on ethnic background, we have a zero tolerance policy on that," Hervey said.
Spangler denies she distributed the e-mail after she received it April 23. She said she left it in her purse, which was in the registration area of the emergency room. Later that night, as she was hunting through her purse for something else, she said she pulled it out and tore it up, dropping it in a garbage can.
On May 1, she said, she received a call from a manager in the emergency room who asked her to apply for a supervisory position. On May 5, a Bayfront supervisor called her in and asked her about the e-mail. The supervisor, who had a copy of the attachment, said she had received a complaint that Spangler had distributed it in the emergency room.
Spangler denied she gave the e-mail to anyone. The next day she was fired. She said her Bayfront supervisors asked her who had sent her the e-mail (they only had a copy of the attachment, not the original e-mail itself), but she said she refused to give up her friend, Gulley.
But news of the e-mail had gotten around the hospital, and before long Gulley was called in to account for it. Gulley, a Bayfront receptionist for four years, admitted sending the e-mail and was fired May 14. She said she didn't find the attachment offensive. In addition to the fictional content, the resume showed a photo of an overweight black woman in skimpy lingerie.
"It was about my race, it was about my own culture, and it was funny," said Gulley, 36, who lives in Childs Park and supports four children. "Lisa is no more prejudiced or racist than I am. I don't understand what Bayfront's position is on that. It wasn't about race."
Spangler and Gulley said they were told by their respective supervisors that Bayfront, which has about 2,000 employees, had acquired a reputation as a racially insensitive place to work, and so the hospital would not tolerate any violations.
Bayfront officials declined to provide details about the specific employees who were fired or what supervisors might have said to them. Hervey said other employees had been fired in the past for sending inappropriate e-mails, but he could not say how many.
Both Spangler and Gulley believe they were wrongfully terminated and have made appointments with the city's equal employment opportunity office to lodge complaints against Bayfront. Spangler said she hasn't had an exit interview with the hospital's human resources department.
A national survey in 2001 of 435 U.S. corporations found 51 percent had disciplined employees for violating an e-mail policy. Of those, 17 percent had terminated employees, according to the American Management Institute and the ePolicy Institute.
Nancy Flynn, executive director of corporate training and consultant, ePolicy Institute, said companies need to make sure that their employees are aware of their e-mail policies and that they apply those rules consistently.
She said using a printer, as Spangler did, to print out the e-mail is wrong because it's the company's printer.
But Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, said he is accustomed to seeing people punished for disseminating an offensive e-mail, not receiving one. He said Spangler's case is unusual, because there does not appear to be an electronic trail of her passing along the e-mail.
"People can say anything they want," Tien said. "I guess the point I would emphasize is that employers should investigate these sorts of complaints with care because it's easy to use this kind of thing for personal reasons or to get back at someone or cause harm to someone's reputation without solid proof. That doesn't mean it happened."
Hervey pointed to the existence of a copy of the e-mail attachment, provided by the employee who complained in writing, as evidence that Spangler distributed it.
Spangler wonders about that proof and said Bayfront officials told her that only one person had complained about the e-mail.
"There's no one to corroborate that I ever showed anyone this e-mail in the emergency room, so I'm being terminated on a he said-she said issue," Spangler said. "I don't think the punishment fits the alleged crime."
- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report, which includes information from Times wires.
