MANA EMPLOYMENT LAW

MANA 4320.001 (2020 Spring) Exam #1 (Page 1 of 8)

Welcome to the first examination for Employment Law (MANA 4320.001)! The exam is due at https://uta.instructure.com/courses/45489/assignments/556649 no later than 9:30am on ThursdayTuesday, February 18, 2020. A student’s grade on this examination will be reduced by 5% for every twelve hours that the exam is late (e.g., minus 5% if submitted by 9:30pm on 2/18, minus 10% [total] if submitted by 9:30am on 2/19, minus 15% [total] if submitted by 9:30pm on 2/19, etc.). Please submit the examination in a .docx file using the template provided at https://uta.instructure.com/courses/45489/assignments/556649. This examination is setup in Canvas for anonymous grading. Please do not put your name or any other identifying information in your exam submissions. There is a place in the header of the response template for you to put your UTA ID number. Your analyses of the case and the creation of your written submission should be your own independent work. However, this is a take-home exam. So, a little more clarity might be needed… I think these types of behaviors are perfectly acceptable:

• The use of any and all non-human resources (e.g., printed materials, hypertext and hypermedia materials, audio recordings, video records, works of art, etc.) – assuming that direct quotations are identified and cited and assuming that any big ideas from sources other than your own original analysis are cited. You may use any of the standard citation systems that you like, as long as it’s one of these: APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, Bluebook, Harvard, McGill, ALWD, Tanbook, Greenbook, Maroonbook, OSCOLA, AAA, or APSA – either in-text or in footnotes.

• Using the services of the UTA Writing Center – provided that you disclose that you are working on an examination and you provide the tutor with a complete copy of this exam document.

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• Receiving assistance in finding sources from a university librarian – provided that you disclose that you are working on an examination and you provide the librarian with a complete copy of this exam document.

• Receiving technical assistance from the UTA OIT Help Desk, Canvas Support, or/and Nexis Uni Support.

• Sharing non-human resources (e.g., printed materials, hypertext and hypermedia materials, audio recordings, video records, works of art, etc.) with other students in the class.

• Receiving non-human resources (e.g., printed materials, hypertext and hypermedia materials, audio recordings, video records, works of art, etc.) from other students in the class.

• Discussing the exam’s content with other students in the class.

Here are the relative weights of the exam components:

Component Percent Issue 15 % Rule 25 %

Application 50 % Conclusion 5 %

See the University’s statements on Academic Integrity, Acknowledging Sources, and the UTA Library’s Tutorial on Plagiarism. Once class adjourns on February 11, 2020, Graca will not communicate with anyone with respect to any aspect of the exam until 8:00am on February 20, 2020. Good luck!

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The Case of Crawford Creative Consulting1 Dr. Wayne Stanley Crawford has been an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Texas at Arlington since July 1, 2015. He was hired in 2015 based primarily on his enormous potential for success as a social-science researcher and human resource management teacher – as evidenced by his existing body of work at the time. Like most professors in the UTA College of Business, Crawford’s primary duties are 1) conducting original and applied research, 2) teaching undergraduate and graduate management courses, and 3) service to the university, the profession, and the broader community. Crawford’s bona fides are described in some detail at https://mentis.uta.edu/explore/profile/wayne-crawford. In short: 1) His research is considered ground-breaking. 2) His teaching is considered excellent (so good in fact that one semester his teaching scores were almost as good as Graca’s).2 3) And his service is highly valued by both his colleagues and the College administration. On Friday, November 1, 2019, Dr. Crawford was called into a 2:00pm meeting in the office of Dr. Greg Frazier, Associate Dean of the UTA College of Business. Crawford was somewhat nervous that he was going to get in trouble for his expletive-laden H/R metrics rant in MANA 5329 on Monday, October 28, 2019. (A student had captured the diatribe on mobile-phone video and posted it to YouTube, but the video has subsequently been removed for violating YouTube’s terms of use.) Crawford became even more anxious when he entered Frazier’s office to find that the Management department chair Dr. George Benson and the Dean of the College of Business Harry Dombrowski were also present. And being a scholar of human resource management, Crawford knew what often happened at surprise Friday-afternoon meetings… As Dr. Crawford was mentally planning his defense, Dr. Frazier began speaking. Frazier explained that the University of Texas System Board of Regents had voted the preceding evening to award Crawford academic tenure with the University. For a couple reasons, Crawford assumed that Frazier was joking; the reasons were: 1) Crawford’s humility, and 1 While some of the characters in this case are based closely on real people, the operative facts are entirely fictional. 2 Wow!

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2) the fact that he hadn’t even applied for tenure. So, while the three administrators began their congratulating and back-slapping, Crawford could only wonder what their game was. After seeing the signed and sealed letter from the Chancellor of the UT System, Crawford finally realized that they were on the level – that he had actually received tenure! Over the next few days, a number of colleagues from around the College had called and texted Crawford to offer their congratulations, but all of their calls and texts went unanswered. (This was very out-of-character; Crawford religiously responded to all communications from colleagues on the same day and usually within the same hour.) Dr. Crawford limped into the office at 4:45pm on Monday, November 4, 2019, wearing gray sweat pants, a black “FBI: Female Body Inspector” t-shirt, very dark sunglasses, and carrying two banana bags (one connected to his left arm intravenously). When Graca heard Crawford’s door open, he immediately made his way down from COBA-231 to COBA- 212. After congratulating Crawford, Graca went on to opine how wonderful it is that Crawford would now be able to do the kind of research that he really wanted to do (and would be able to more actively engage with the administration of the Management department’s graduate program) without the tenure-earning clock ticking in the back in the back of his brain. Crawford’s haze cleared a little bit, and he got a big smile on his face. After a bit of a pause, Crawford responded: “Mute that noise, son! Now it’s time for Daddy to make some coin.” Graca was taken somewhat aback – mostly because Crawford was now apparently referring to himself as “Daddy.” Crawford went on to explain that he would no longer be devoting every single waking moment to his aggressive, critically important, already ground-breaking, and potentially paradigm-shifting research agenda (as he had done for the past five years). Instead, he would begin taking full advantage of UT System Regents’ Rule 30104: Conflict of Interest, Conflict of Commitment, and Outside Activities. (The rule permits UTA faculty members to engage in outside work for pay under certain circumstances and with certain limitations.) Specifically, Crawford planned to launch a consulting firm that would take out-sourced work primarily in the area of human resource business analytics from local firms.

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Crawford’s initial estimate is that he could work on his consulting business about ten hours each week and could charge about $1,000.00 per hour for his services. This would allow him to gross an addition $500,000.00 each year (in addition to his UTA salary). After getting some basic legal advice, Crawford decided that a Texas Limited-Liability Company would be the best business organization for him. And “Crawford Creative Consulting, LLC” (“CCC”) was born. But after analyzing his expected margin and tax liabilities, Crawford opined to Graca, “That’s still chump-change, Yo! There’s got to be some way for me to quintuple that…” And eventually his scheme was hatched: Despite everything he says in class, to prospective clients, to his spouse whenever she’s contemplating leaving him, to his daughter every night in lieu of a typical bed-time story, and to anyone else who’ll listen (and even some who won’t), Crawford knows in his heart that human resource business analytics is really just a mere shell game. You see, all that really happens in the H/R analytics “black box” is that the consultant: 1) gets a data set from a firm in a particular format, 2) runs it through (university-owned) software that spits it out in a different format, 3) makes some pretty graphs, and finally 4) plagiarizes an “executive summary.” According to Crawford, “any monkey could do it.” And that became the rub! Crawford would train some “monkeys” (as he calls them) (upper-class UTA undergraduates and UTA graduate students) to do the work. In this way: by hiring four “intern-analysts,” Crawford could indeed nearly quintuple CCC’s productivity and (more importantly) nearly quintuple his profit. Now to find “the monkeys.” Dr. Crawford created a “job description” and “job specification,” and posted his “internship” in the Handshake database, a service of the UTA Lockheed Martin Career Development Center. (By “created,” I mean that he mostly cut- and-pasted something from O*NET.) A copy of the posting is included in Appendix B. You’ll note that Dr. Crawford considers the interns to be “independent contractors.” He did this because he wants to avoid having to pay half of the social security tax… Because the response to Dr. Crawford’s posting was so overwhelming (over 600 applicants), he wanted to use a simple (and free) assessment to shrink his pool some. So, he used a ten-key speed typing test. He then interviewed the ten highest-scoring applicants

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and selected the four from whom he seemed to get the best “vibe.” Each of the selected four had a different motivation for wanting the internship:

1) Mariana was a 4.0 UTA senior Management & Information Systems & Statistics triple-major. Mariana wanted to attend graduate school in the UTA Management department after graduation, and she thought the internship would give her a leg-up in understanding business research methodologies. And it wasn’t lost on Mariana that Dr. Crawford was also the chair of the Management department graduate studies committee, or that he could use his influence to ensure her admission to the graduate program and a sweet financial aid package.

2) Ned was a 3.2 UTA senior Management & Marketing double-major. He really only cared about human resource management, and he was a self-described “H/R nerd.” He only added the Marketing major because UTA still doesn’t have a BBA in human resource management and never offers its upper-level management electives at convenient times (with the exception of MANA 4320 – “Employment Law” – of course). Ned wanted to get an entry-level job as a human resources generalist after graduation, and he thought he could use the internship to satisfy the “experience” requirements of the entry-level H/R professional certifications and to generally make himself more marketable on the entry-level H/R market.

3) Omar was a 2.25 UTA Real Estate major. He had actually applied for the internship by mistake. But he went ahead and took the ten-key test anyway since he knew he would crush it. Which he did! He had the highest score of all 600 test-takers – 25,000 KPM. And he and Dr. Crawford “totally vibed,” so he accepted the internship.

4) Peaches was a graduate student in the Management department. She liked the analytics stuff well enough, but it was definitely not her passion. Peaches was an international student at UTA, and her particular visa did not permit her to work for pay – at all – while she was a student in the U.S. But she really needed the money. And she knew Dr. Crawford well enough to know that he wasn’t a stickler for silly things like I-9 forms. The bottom line is that she was just in it for the money.

Prompt for QUESTION ONE (The Case of Crawford Creative Consulting, LLC) In eight hundred words or fewer, provide a thorough legal analysis (preferably using the suggested “IRAC” format) of the legal issue presented related to the status of the four interns as “employees” or not.

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Appendix B: Job Posting Hiring Firm: Crawford Creative Consulting, LLC Hiring Manager: Dr. Wayne Stanley Crawford, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, B.A., M.B.A., Ph.D. Position Title: Human Resource Management Consulting Intern-Contractor Start Date: Approximately January 6, 2020 Type: Part-Time (less than 20 hours per week) Compensation: Negotiable Competitive Hourly Compensation based upon Billable

Hours FLSA Status: Not Applicable – Independent Contractor and Intern Work Schedule: Negotiable and by Tele-Commuting (Intern must have her/his own

Windows-based PC that meets or exceeds the UTA College of Engineering’s “Student Computer Recommendation.”)

Primary Responsibilities Under Dr. Crawford’s direction: • Synthesize human resource business intelligence and trend data to support recommendations

for client action. • Collect business intelligence data from client-provided data and from available industry

reports, public information, field reports, and purchased sources. • Identify and analyze industry or geographic trends with human resource management strategy

implications. • Analyze technology trends to inform client human resource management intelligence. • Generate standard and custom reports summarizing human resource management data for

review by Dr. Crawford, clients, and other stakeholders. • Maintain or update human resource management analytic/intelligence tools, databases,

dashboards, systems, or methods. • Maintain library of model documents, templates, and other reusable knowledge assets. • Create business intelligence tools and systems, including design of related databases,

spreadsheets, and deliverables. • Conduct and coordinate tests to ensure that intelligence is consistent with defined needs. • Disseminate information regarding tools, reports, and metadata enhancements.

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Required Knowledge • English Language — Knowledge of the structure and content of the English language

including the meaning and spelling of words, rules of composition, and grammar. • Administration and Management — Knowledge of business and management principles

involved in strategic planning, resource allocation, human resources modeling, leadership technique, production methods, and coordination of people and resources.

• Mathematics — Knowledge of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, statistics, and their applications.

• Economics and Accounting — Knowledge of economic and accounting principles and practices, the financial markets, banking and the analysis and reporting of financial data.

• Communications and Media — Knowledge of media production, communication, and dissemination techniques and methods. This includes alternative ways to inform and entertain via written, oral, and visual media.

Required Skills • Critical Thinking — Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of

alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems. • Active Listening — Giving full attention to what other people (especially Dr. Crawford) are

saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting at inappropriate times.

• Reading Comprehension — Understanding written sentences and paragraphs in work related documents.

• Speaking — Talking to others to convey information effectively. • Judgment and Decision Making — Considering the relative costs and benefits of potential

actions to choose the most appropriate one. • Systems Analysis — Determining how a system should work and how changes in conditions,

operations, and the environment will affect outcomes. • Time Management — Managing one's own time and the time of others. • Writing — Communicating effectively in writing as appropriate for the needs of the audience. • Complex Problem Solving — Identifying complex problems and reviewing related

information to develop and evaluate options and implement solutions. • Social Perceptiveness — Being aware of others' reactions and understanding why they react

as they do. • Systems Evaluation — Identifying measures or indicators of system performance and the

actions needed to improve or correct performance, relative to the goals of the system. • Coordination — Adjusting actions in relation to others' actions. • Mathematics — Using mathematics to solve problems. • Monitoring — Monitoring/Assessing performance of yourself, other individuals, or

organizations to make improvements or take corrective action. • Persuasion — Persuading others to change their minds or behavior.