July 28 HPPOA board Special Meeting

[james weatherford]

quote:

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Originally posted by Obie

They are "at will employees".They don't have a union or a contact and can be fired at any time and for any reason.

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Yes, 'at will'.
However, there is a process according to the HPPOA Bylaws and according to State Law, and when those processes are not followed, then the (fairly or unfairly) dismissed employees have a legal case.

[csgray]

Obie: "They are "at will employees".They don't have a union or a contact and can be fired at any time and for any reason.

Fairly common when there is a regime change."

Even at will employees have to be fired according to the HPPOA by laws, which are the processes the board members have to follow when they take any action. Otherwise the board could do whatever they wanted, however they wanted. Is that how you guys run things in Kapoho? I doubt it.

It is really bad for organizations if every time there is an election the new board fires all the staff. That does away with all institutional memory for how and why things are done, and it gets very expensive to keep hiring and training people. We have an election every year, we cannot fire all our managers every year.

Carol

[james weatherford]

Carol, please try to be at the meeting Monday, 6pm.

[csgray]

James,
I will try, but the next day is my first day back to work for the new school year, which is really bad timing.

Carol

[Obie]

You guys need to read your own bylaws.I didn't see anything in there that would protect employees.

Could be they were fired because of the huge liability HPP is facing because of an illegal dump.

[Seeb]

There are certain state and federal laws that preempt the at-will thing

[Seeb]

I have for a long time thought that there needs to be a residents association or something. And maybe with a small due or donation to hire someone to go to all this meetings that a lot of people can't get to and record what's actually happening. The minutes of meetings I've been to don't have any resemblance to what actually happened, except the list of names

[steve1]

"
"They are "at will employees".They don't have a union or a contact and can be fired at any time and for any reason.

Fairly common when there is a regime change."

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I don't believe you know what you are typing or how he real world works. Hawai'i is a very union friendly state. Some might say overly friendly, but that friendliness is also embedded within the laws of Hawai'i and also backed up by certain federal laws.

People sometimes have to sue their employers for wrongful termination,racial and/ or sexual discrimination, etc. so it would behoove all employers to only fire people for Just Cause and to apply the principles of Due Process when issuing disciplinary actions. They may be asked to substantiate their decisions in a court of law and may be putting their personal and/ or business assets at risk.

As far as "regime change" is concerned, this generally applies to high level highly paid political appointees, not working class people.

[csgray]

Obie,
It is not a matter of IF the board can fire people, it is HOW the board has to do things to follow our by laws.

They absolutely can fire employees, but they have to do that at legally called meetings where there was public notice of the meeting as required by the by laws. There is a big difference in calling a special meeting behind closed doors without following the legal process for calling meetings and firing people, and calling a special meeting, with the legally required public notice to the members, and then going into executive session and firing employees. One is a legitimate process resulting in legal firings, and one is an illigitimate process resulting in leaving the entire board open to a whole host of legal issues.

"You guys need to read your own bylaws." I don't know why you feel like you have to tell the people in a subdivision you live miles away from how they need to conduct their business, you must not have enough going on in your own life. I'm glad your subdivision has so few problems that you have all this energy to expend on HPP.

Carol

[csgray]

Back to the actual topic at hand:

The announcement on the HPPOA website told people to contact their representative on the HPP board. Ours didn't have any contact information so I contacted the Board president several days ago. I have heard nothing back, did anyone else hear back?

It is really lame to tell people to contact the Board members and then not respond. Why even bother to tell people to contact these people with questions if you don't intend to respond? Not everyone can make it to the meeting they scheduled, but if you tell people to send their questions to certain people, those people should be prepared to answer those questions.

Carol