HR managers looking after expatriates—including those employees on short term international assignments or travelling on company business for extended periods of time—should pay close attention to the story of Canadian Nancy Cochran. Robin Pascoe reports.

Cochran’s husband John, a 25 year veteran of Canada’s largest telecom Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), died in1999 of a heart attack while on a short term international assignment in New York state. At the time of his death, he was working for Expertech, a company outsourced by BCE for the work he was carrying out.

His wife claims she first learned she had become a widow through a telephone call from the local coroner in Albany, New York. Someone from the company, she alleges, came to his funeral to retrieve his laptop computer. From then on, she says, she was only sent forms to fill in and repeatedly stonewalled and ignored by HR whenever she tried to ask questions about them.

Nancy Cochran is suing BCE, Expertech and the HR people involved, in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice for the company’s failure to have adequate policies in place to support an international assignee. She is seeking a significant punitive award. HR—along with the CEO of the outsourced company and the former CEO of the parent company BCE—is specifically named in the law suit for failure to provide proper duty of care of its employee.

The legal battle boils down to the breakdown in communication between the company and the widow over not only the lack of information and understanding about her husband’s death, but more significantly, over issues of insurance and pension benefits that still remain unresolved.

Months of unanswered phone calls and e-mails to the company’s HR department forced Nancy Cochran to engage a lawyer to fight for answers. She’s still fighting over four years later and says she is not going to disappear quietly into the night. She’s determined that no other family member endure what she has been through. She hasn’t even unpacked her husband’s suitcases, awaiting closure first. Does this story send a chill down the spine of an HR manager? It should.

Survey after survey indicates that short term assignments are on the rise. Outsourcing is another popular trend. The current challenge for HR managers is to develop policies that explain how a short term assignment for an outsourced company will work, as quickly as they are deploying short term assignees.

When told about this Canadian case, the head of HR for the National Foreign Trade Council in the United States, William Sheridan, said it should be considered a ‘wakeup call’ for all international businesses as the implications for HR managers are clear: Has HR spelled out in full what it may be asking of an employee when he/she accepts a short term assignment?

“They have to ask themselves this: have they explained to an employee going out on a short term, outsourced assignment exactly what his status is? That is, is he still entitled to his pension? And if not, does he know that?” says Nancy Cochran’s lawyer Wylita Clark, who believes employees should have independent counsel (paid for by the company) review any short term assignment agreement.

“It’s also important that HR know what measures it will take in the event of an employee’s death,” she says.

“What travel insurance coverage does the employee have, if any, and is he—and his family—aware of it?” she also asks, after her experience with Cochran’s case. Nancy was unaware of a business travel insurance policy on her husband until almost three years later when the claim period was about to expire.

Most importantly, says lawyer Clark, how is the company planning to communicate with a widow in the event of a death or any other emergency?

Fighting Cochran’s case and going head to head with a major Canadian corporation and their lawyers, Clark believes a company can and should act as an information resource for the family of any employee, and especially when one dies on assignment. “They owed Nancy more than just sending over a bunch of papers without answering any of her questions about them,” says Clark. “She had just lost her husband.”

“If the word ‘human’ is going to be part of ‘human resources’,” notes Clark, “it would seem logical that the managers act like human beings. Compassion may not be written into the law but it should be part of their job.”

November 2003

Robin Pascoe has written four books on global living and can be found at her web site www.expatexpert.com