KEY POINTS:
Memo to Dad's staff - can you do my homework?
New Zealand has a high proportion of small businesses relative to other OECD countries, and most New Zealanders have worked in one at some point or other. Such businesses are often owned by a family, or a small
circle of shareholders who know each other well.
In small businesses, it's common for the owner's children to work part time while they are studying, or to join the payroll full time, with a view to taking over the business one day.
The problem with working with the boss's kids is that sometimes their position is abused. Favours from other staff are extracted in return for promises of preferential treatment, or in return for withholding some sort of punishment - such as being rostered onto the Saturday night shift, or cleaning duty - or worse.
Recently someone in India took this to a whole new level - and in a relatively large business. The daughter of two partners at one of India's most prestigious law firms sent an email to lawyers in the firm's Mumbai office, asking them to do her homework for her. She wasn't even an employee.
She claimed that the subject matter, namely macro-economic risk management, mutual funds, bonus shares, and other such subjects, were "very simple". She even had the gall to copy her parents in - just to increase the chance of some mug swallowing the bait.
Sometimes it's hard for employees to do anything about this sort of behaviour. In this case no one in particular was approached, and so presumably all those emailed could have got away with doing nothing. But in a smaller business, the employee may be approached directly by the family member. Where they know the boss personally and believe they will be unsympathetic to a complaint, the employee may feel they have no choice but to take it on the chin.
Or the boss may even tell them to do it - relying on the classic "other duties as required" wording in the job description. Such wording can be relied on to get employees to do jobs technically outside their job description, but there should be some link to their actual role, or at least it should be work for the business itself. In most cases, wording of that nature does not allow bosses / owners to make staff do their kids' homework, or their shopping, or whatever.
Have you ever been subjected to manipulation by someone in the owner's family? Or the owner themselves for that matter?
Greg Cain
Greg Cain is an employment lawyer at Minter Ellison Rudd Watts.
