Hope you had a good weekend. Mine was fine, despite the Mets not quite making it to the World Series. — Dan

Is It Illegal To Not Wish Someone Farewell?

Imagine that you have been working at the same company for a number of years and I’ve decided that it is time to move on. You find a new job, tell your supervisor, and over the next few weeks, wrap things up as to not leave your your current colleagues in the lurch. They, on the other hand, may panic about what they’re going to do without you, but they also want to celebrate you. And on the last day of your time with the company, there’s a cake, farewell, drink, and maybe even a card.

It’s a nice thing to do, right? Send somebody off to their next job with a smile? But it’s definitely not required by law… Right?

That’s not what an airline employee named Karen Conaghan thought.

From 2019 until 2021, Conaghan worked as a business liaison for International Airlines Group, or IAG, the parent company of British Airways. For reasons unclear, she was laid off in 2021. And on her last day of work, her colleagues did not give her a card saying goodbye and wishing her luck in her future endeavors. For most people, that wouldn’t be a big deal — maybe it was an oversight or maybe her colleagues simply felt weird giving her a card due to her reason for exiting the company. But in any event, Conaghan felt slighted by the omission.

This wasn’t the first time she felt that way, either, but it was the final straw. As The Guardian reported, Conaghan sued IAG, bringing “40 complaints against the company for sexual harassment, victimization, and unfair dismissal.” Her work experience, she alleged, was pervasively awful, and the fact that her coworkers didn’t even say “best wishes” as she left was the key piece of evidence. As Lawyer Monthly explained, “At the heart of Conaghan's case was the claim that she did not receive a farewell card when she left in 2021, as reported by the news. She contended that this omission represented a lack of recognition for her efforts, suggesting it was part of a larger pattern of mistreatment.”

But, per the court, Conaghan’s perceptions didn’t match reality. Per Vice, Conaghan’s “perspective on her workplace experience was clouded by a ‘conspiracy-theory mentality,’” for example, “she says that she used the word ‘whiz’ in a card for a colleague—then says that another colleague then copied her use of the word while simultaneously correcting her spelling to add another ‘Z’ at the end of the word.” In another instance, a colleague accused her of taking all the credit for their collective efforts after she suggested that she, had, in fact, claimed she had done all the hard work.

And then came the matter of the missing greeting card. Per the Guardian, “a former colleague told an employment tribunal that managers had indeed bought a card but did not present it to Conaghan because of the low number of signatures.” Basically, the reason Conaghan didn’t get her bon voyage note was because her coworkers didn’t really like her, but didn’t hate her so much as to want to embarrass her. And her not receiving a card was also not unique; two other people who were laid off at around the same time — both of which were men — weren’t given a card, either.

The judge in the matter found that Conaghan wasn’t a victim of harassment and that her dismissal was not unfair — her experience, while not always fun, “either did not happen or, if they did happen, they were innocuous interactions in the normal course of employment.” She did not get any compensation for the slights she perceived, and she did not get a greeting card from the court, either.

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More About Farewell Parties and Greeting Cards

Today’s Bonus fact: In September of 1787, the American delegates to the Constitutional Convention held a farewell party of sorts, hosted by George Washington. We don’t know much about the event, but a listing of the bar tab has survived. As Teaching American History shares, a total of 55 celebrants went through 60 bottles of Claret, 54 bottles of Madera, 7 “large bowls of punch,” and lots more. Additionally, 16 musicians and servants were treated to a proportional-sized bounty of booze themselves. In total, the bill came to the modern-day equivalent of about $15,000.

From the Archives: The Valentine's Cards You Don't Want to Get: They’re not very nice.

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And thanks! — Dan