The author of The Litigation Explosion returns with a forceful account of how employment law increasingly makes mediocrity the norm of the American workplace. Thanks to the unintended consequences of well-meaning laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, it is now increasingly difficult to fire slacking employees for perfectly justifiable reasons. Olson tells story after story of abuse, including one in which a jury awarded nearly $200,000 to a man fired for showing up late to work 215 times in a two-year period. This hurts employers who need productive staffs and insults hard-working people everywhere. The Excuse Factory is hands-down one of the best books available on America's faltering legal system.
From Booklist
Olson created a stir with The Litigation Explosion (1991) when he took on product-liability and personal-injury lawyers, highlighting abuses within the legal system and issuing a call for reform. This new attack on employment law will also roil. Olson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative public policy think tank. He argues that discrimination and harassment laws, rights for the handicapped and other groups, the "accommodation" of such personal problems as alcohol and drug abuse in the workplace, and the decline of "employment at will" have all created a climate in which managers fear disciplining or discharging difficult or incompetent employees. There is no denying that Olson's case studies, statistics, and anecdotal examples uncover disturbing contradictions and misapplication of the law, and it is clear that Olson's real target is the lawyers who press the resulting lawsuits. But underlying his argument is the assumption that all bosses are reasonable and fair-minded. That may not always be the case. David Rouse
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