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While one is inclined to sympathize with Ms. Uvino as she fights the good fight, sticking it to the man as it were, I can’t help feeling that the plaintiff is more concerned with bread-and-butter needs than seeking her just deserts.

Consider…

Ms. Uvino initially resists the offer from Lehman to oversee the bank’s winding down as the promised compensation is somewhat less than the $600,000 she earned in 2007. But she takes the pay-cut anyway. Her complaint now is that she was not only screwed out of half-a-mil, but she was ignored by higher-ups who, apparently, repeatedly snubbed her.  I’m sure punitive damages would dissuade the bank from repeating this unconscionable act of constructive dismissal — shame, shame, shame!

Who knows what happened in the interim, or what her current compensation is, but Ms. Uvino works today as the top HR-wallah for Natixis North America. According to Jobs-Salaries.com the average salary at her new employ is a tad over $100,000. One imagines that whatever she has by way of “commitments” with Natixis, Ms. Uvino has taken another pay-cut, one so deep perhaps that she sees suing the bank, and a failed one to boot, as the only way to keep the lights on.

There are a number of additional points worth considering I think:

• In the corridors of power, and particularly among bankers, when the shit hits the fan — like compensation — it is never evenly distributed.
• When it comes to “emotional distress, humiliation, embarrassment and anguish,” who feels it knows it, Lord. Lehman Brothers were responsible for the ruination of thousands, possibly millions of people who could, no doubt, tell Ms. Uvino a thing or two about emotional distress, humiliation, embarrassment and anguish. Ms. Uvino may not have had a direct hand in the financial melt-down that followed Lehman’s Brothers complicit avarice but, for a salary of $600,000 and a seat at the table I’m sure, is collective responsibility too much to expect from our HR leadership? From where I sit, that would certainly more dignified than a lawsuit.
• The last three years have been difficult times for many people, forced out of jobs and into new work that demands more and more for less and less. Based on the reports at least, it appears that Ms. Uvino is no different from a lot of big-money earners whose are finding it hard to transition from earnings-potential to economic reality.
• It’s sad but true, the legitimacy of one’s claim has no bearing on a future employer’s evaluation of a litigious employee who, on the face of it, has an axe to grind. It doesn’t help to have a resume and salary history that reflects failure, however “unjust” or inaccurate a reading that might be.

Wendy, you sue the bastards, that’s what I say. Based on the reports though, I doubt you’ll win.

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John Sumser poses some interesting questions in a post on HRExaminer: Structural Unemployment in HR , commenting:

The market will face a dichotomy: a surplus of people with HR resumes and a shortage of people with the right skills. This is how structural employment looks within a single discipline.

Today, it is hard to find a cobbler who can resole your shoes. The gradual elimination of that trade has not impacted the demand for shoes or the industry’s ability to keep occidental pedestrians fashionably and/or functionally shod. In fact, demand for shoes is improved by the passing of the humble cobbler.

It may be some ways off but I wonder how long it will be before we see no results for HR-discards looking for their now outsourced jobs online?

Ex-cobblers would be stupid indeed to make their experience as a cobbler the centerpiece of their resume when applying for any job other than Al Bundy’s perhaps, the type of worker “a shortage of people with the right skills” often produces. I think the same may be true for displaced HR workers too.

What say you?

You can read John at his finest on the subject on the GlassDoor.com blog: Why Workers Get Left Behind.

Oh, John…Gareth Morgan, your friend and mine, sends his regards, as does Paddy Mac!

To quote anchorman Neil Cavuto on justifiable outrage:

“No screaming, no ranting, no raving, no yelling, no pontificating…”

File this one under “Weird.”