Clackamas Community College fires the whistleblowers

Last month the Oregon Court of Appeals decided its own Brown v. Board of Education, which unlike its celebrated 1954 namesake did not deal with desegregation but with employment.  The "Board of Education" in the title is actually the board of directors of the Clackamas Community College District, and the case was brought by two fired employees who wanted damages or their jobs back.  Here are the facts as described by the court.

The District hired Messrs. Brown and Shidler (the other plaintiff) to be security guards at the college.  As part of their job Clackamas County made them special deputy sheriffs with law enforcement authority on the school grounds.  At about the same time, the college hired a Mr. Dixson as a security guard.  Mr. Dixson told Messrs. Brown and Shidler that he had 30 years’ experience as a Veterans Administration security officer in White City.  On his job application, Mr. Dixson said only that he had been a VA guard for two years at White City.  In fact he had been a patient at the hospital who had worked as a patient guard, answering phones and checking alarms.

Messrs. Brown and Shidler began to believe that Mr. Dixson did not have the qualifications he claimed to have, apparently because he did not act in the manner of an experienced security officer.  They did some investigating without telling their supervisor, who was friendly to Mr. Dixson, and found that Mr. Dixson had seriously misrepresented his background and was using someone else’s law enforcement registration number.  They did not know that their supervisor had already fired Mr. Dixson after his driver’s license was suspended.   Their supervisor did invite Mr. Dixson to reapply whenever he regained his license.

Mr. Dixson found out that he was being investigated, traced the investigation to his two former co-workers, and complained to his former supervisor.  The supervisor then fired Messrs. Brown and Shidler, who sued seeking damages for wrongful discharge.

Those are the basic facts.  (The opinion is juicier.)  How would you rule?

The Court of Appeals said that the college could terminate Messrs. Brown and Shidler because invstigating their unqualified coworker was not part of their job, so they weren’t entitled to any employment protections for acting on their suspicions.  Mr. Dixson, who apparently did not tell the truth about his qualifications, can get his job back; Messrs. Brown and Shidler, who discovered this, can’t.  The moral to the story, perhaps, is that if you think your co-worker lied to get hired, don’t do your own investigation, or you and your co-worker may both be on the breadline.