I am the part-time supervisor of a secretary who is efficient, calm, and reliable. The individual who is her supervisor for the other 50% of her time is verbally abusive to her (threatening, not name calling), and has insisted that the employee drive the supervisor's car to take the supervisor to and from meetings. (This is a privately owned car not a company vehicle). We are approaching the verbal abuse separately working with our human resources folks, and documenting her inappropriate allegations and actions.

I would appreciate your thoughts on the advisability of this employee continuing to comply with the boss's demands that she act as chauffeur.

Rita Risser replies:

On the one hand, driving the boss to meetings is job related, and bosses can legally require employees to do things that may be a stupid waste of time, but are nonetheless job related. I could see the boss argue, for example, that she gets work done while the employee drives.

On the other hand, there is a question of insurance. If they get in an accident, it would be covered by workers compensation. I don't know if there would be a problem from workers comp insurance due to the fact of driving someone else's car.

I think that the company could deal with this in at least three ways. One is by simply stating it is a liability issue -- if there was an accident, two valuable employees could be injured, a needless risk. (Also, I shudder to think what the supervisor would do if the secretary got them into an accident -- would she sue the secretary?) Second, the company could deal with it as a productivity issue -- it is not a productive use of the secretary's time. Third, you could deal with it as a "not in her job description" issue, and even if there are no written job descriptions, or the description says something like "other duties as assigned" the company could still decree it is not appropriate for a secretary to perform these tasks. In fact, if the secretary has so much "free time" working for this supervisor that she can drive her around, perhaps the supervisor only needs her for 25% of her time and another supervisor (you?) could use the extra hours.

Bottom line: Management does have the right to discipline supervisors for inappropriate use of employee time.