Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 7, 1995 TAG: 9504070082
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Medium
From the beginning, the judge said, the rooster was a marked bird.
Until last year, Volvo GM Heavy Truck Corp.'s procedure for admonishing workers who showed up late for work was to sic an employee dressed up as a rooster on them.
So one January day last year, Marshall Lineberry showed up late for his 6 a.m. shift. His back was hurting and he almost didn't go in, but finally he popped some aspirin and went to work.
An assembler in production, he got to work around 9 a.m. and had been there a little while when the rooster snuck up behind him, flapped his wings and let out his ``cock-a-doodle-do!''
Call it the case of the cock that got clocked.
Lineberry punched the bird. Nay, not exactly. According to a Virginia Employment Commission report in Pulaski Circuit Court records, he jumped on top of the rooster and began choking it and had to be pulled off by two people.
``I really didn't hit the bird,'' Lineberry said Thursday. ``I just had him around the shoulders.''
Volvo GM suspended Lineberry for violating ``Shop Rule No.9,'' which prohibits fighting on the floor - with man or with bird.
Lineberry, 50 years old and an 18-year employee of the plant, made more than $15 an hour and applied for unemployment benefits. But the employment commission, citing ``misconduct in connection with work,'' denied his claim.
Lineberry's lawyer, Joseph Steffen of Blacksburg, wrote to the employment commission, arguing that the rooster's act amounted to ``much more than a clever reminder to a tardy employee;'' that it was meant to embarrass, even intimidate. ``An employee who felt offended by it simply had nowhere to go.''
Still, the employment commission refused to pay benefits to Lineberry, who was out of work for three months.
So in August, Lineberry sued the employment commission.
In Steffen's petition to the court, he wrote that Lineberry ``admits grabbing the cock-sure and foul bird but denies that such an act amounted to misconduct.'' Last month, Pulaski Circuit Judge Colin Gibb ruled it was time for the employment commission to eat crow and pay up.
Gibb found that the rooster's act amounted to provocation sanctioned by the employer and that the bird itself violated several company rules.
``The most important point,'' he wrote in a letter to the lawyers involved, ``is that the rooster was acting in a quasi-official capacity and, while the response of the petitioner violated his employer's rule, it certainly should not have been unexpected.''
Lineberry said he is owed benefits in the neighborhood of $1,600 to $1,800, though he has yet to receive a check. It's unclear whether the employment commission can appeal; Steffen said he doubted it would.
Lineberry, while glad he was suspended only temporarily, still thinks he got ``shafted'' by not being able to work for three months. He said the rooster act was ``just a time bomb getting ready to go off,'' and he has been told that if he hadn't taken on the rooster, someone else soon would have.
The rooster, who went unidentified Thursday, had an act that was ``well accepted'' around the plant, Volvo GM Human Resources Manager Steve Plastek maintained. But ``once the incident had occurred, the rooster himself decided it would not be in his best interests'' to keep it up.
by CNB