mabinda.com Business, Education, Technology Commentary.

A US court has ruled that it is illegal to transfer an employee across jobs, even if they maintain their pay grade and rank. Previously, most employees only sued if they were demoted unprocedurally, or due to sexual harassment. A surgeon had sued for being transferred to a different job function across the hospital, and she sued the hospital, prompting the ruling. This is likely to be an unprecedented decision, as most companies, even employees, don’t think being transferred across departments is something illegal. Now, an intra company job transfer falls in the same lines as sexual harassment in the office, and so likely many companies would tinge at that. But what would likely make a company transfer you across job functions? One is if your skills don’t fit your current role. That means for instance, you are an engineer where technical skills such as joinery and technical drawing are prized, but you do like telling stories where for instance, your story telling abilities will lead to better crafting of the marketing campaign messages.

Another reason that you are transferred across departments and job functions is simply because the boss doesn’t like you. He prefers working with someone else for the current role and so figures out that since demoting you will amount to a legal dispute and a lot of office politics, then they transfer you to another role where they won’t have to work with you. Intra job transfers point to a lot of toxic office politics and that just means that bosses have their favorites for that position, and so those less liked employees are thrown into other roles. Such an office culture can only be mended from the top, and it really speaks bad of the office culture when the bosses routinely shuffle around employees so as to work with only those they like. It’s on such grounds that an employee can sue that they were discriminated against when transferred from the current role to another, even when they didn’t receive a pay cut or rank in the office.

The other reason that employees are usually transferred from their current roles is if the department is lucrative. For instance, the procurement and purchasing supplies department is one hell lot of a department that a lot of money changes hands and so employees will likely want to work in such a department for financial emoluments, especially if there are a lot of kickbacks in that department. Especially in government and public service roles, people are transferred a lot of times, in what they mostly term as “redeployment”. That means you get the same pay and rank, but you are away from the nerve center of activities and so psychologically, you are deemed to have been demoted. For instance, in government departments, it could be as easy as being moved from the Treasury department or Homeland security department to Education or labour department. Same pay, same rank of cabinet secretary, but the lesser roles are not in the “nerve center” of the government, and so are deemed as lesser roles.