Opinion ID: 3169407
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The employee, acting in good faith, or a

Text: person acting on behalf of the employee, reports orally or in writing to the employer or a public body what the employee has reasonable cause to believe is a violation of a law or rule adopted under the laws of this 9 We acknowledge and thank Amicus Curiae Maine Human Rights Commission for its cogent and informative amicus brief. 10We'll refer to the statute as either the Whistleblower Act or sometimes as just the Act. - 20 - State, a political subdivision of this State or the United States;11 . . . 2. INITIAL REPORT TO EMPLOYER REQUIRED; EXCEPTION. Subsection 1 does not apply to an employee who has reported or caused to be reported a violation, or unsafe condition or practice to a public body, unless the employee has first brought the alleged violation, condition or practice to the attention of a person having supervisory authority with the employer and has allowed the employer a reasonable opportunity to correct that violation, condition or practice. Prior notice to an employer is not required if the employee has specific reason to believe that reports to the employer will not result in promptly correcting the violation, condition or practice. 3. REPORTS OF SUSPECTED ABUSE. An employee required to report suspected abuse, neglect or exploitation under Title 22, section 3477 or 4011-A, shall follow the requirements of those sections under those circumstances. No employer may discharge, threaten or otherwise discriminate against an employee regarding the employee's compensation, terms, conditions, location or privileges of employment because the employee followed the requirements of those sections. Me. Rev. Stat. tit. 26, § 833. The parties do not dispute that Harrison, as a mandated reporter, is [a]n employee required to report suspected abuse, neglect or exploitation within the 11 This section goes on to list four other protected activities, none of which is alleged to be relevant here. - 21 - meaning of § 833(3). See generally Me. Rev. Stat. tit. 22, § 3477 (requiring social workers to report suspected exploitation of incapacitated or dependent adults to DHHS). Maine's Law Court has explained the three elements of a successful Whistleblower Act claim: a plaintiff must show that (1) she engaged in activity protected by the statute; (2) she suffered an adverse employment action; and (3) there was a causal link between the protected activity and the adverse employment action. Costain v. Sunbury Primary Care, P.A., 954 A.2d 1051, 1053 (Me. 2008). Further, Maine law provides a private right of action for a violation of the [Act],12 Murray v. Kindred Nursing Centers West LLC, 789 F.3d 20, 25 (1st Cir. 2015) (citing Me. Rev. Stat. tit. 5, §§ 4572(1)(A), 4621; Costain, 954 A.2d at 1053 & n.2), so Harrison has standing. The parties' flagship arguments are derived not from the language of the Act itself, but from their interpretations of Winslow's effect on the first prong of a Whistleblower Act claim, which requires a showing that the employee engaged in protected 12Technically, the Whistleblower Act does not actually grant an employee a cause of action. It is the Maine Human Rights Act that provides a right of action to persons who have been subject to unlawful discrimination, including whistleblowers who have suffered retaliatory discharge or other adverse employment actions. Costain, 954 A.2d at 1053. Though the Human Rights Act is the source of an employee's right of action, id., the requirements that must be met for an action to be afforded protection stem from the [Whistleblower Act], id. at 1053 n.2. - 22 - activity. In fact, the parties have framed this appeal even more narrowly as presenting the question whether Winslow, when applied here, entitles Granite Bay to judgment as a matter of law. So we focus our attention on this specific question. Granite Bay believes Winslow -- which did not involve a whistleblower claim made by a mandated reporter like Harrison -- stands for the proposition that the Whistleblower Act provides no protection for an employee whose official job description and responsibilities include reporting illegalities (or suspected illegalities) internally or to the government. Granite Bay directs our attention to its internal policies requiring all employees to report suspected exploitation of dependent adults. From this, Granite Bay concludes that Harrison's reports were nothing more than part and parcel of her job responsibilities notwithstanding any statutory reporting mandate applicable to her, and so she can't get Whistleblower Act protection based on Winslow's carve-out. Harrison, too, assumes Winslow recognized a job duties exception, but she says the exception doesn't apply to mandated reporters. In her view, this is because the Whistleblower Act's § 833(3) expressly provides specifically-tailored protections for mandated reporters like herself13 and, as importantly, the Act's 13 Section 833(3) applies to employees required to report suspected abuse, neglect or exploitation under Title 22, section 3477 or 4011-A, and states that [n]o employer may discharge, threaten or otherwise discriminate against an employee regarding - 23 - plain language does not include a job duties exception. According to Harrison, the Maine Law Court implicitly held as much in the case of Blake v. State, 868 A.2d 234 (Me. 2005).14 Thus, in her view, reading a job duties exception into the statute would render meaningless the very protections explicitly written in by the Maine Legislature and acknowledged by Maine's highest court. As a fallback, Harrison says that even if Winslow's job duties exception applies to mandated reporters, it is not a blanket exception that an employer can lean on anytime it feels like it by creating internal policies generally requiring its employees to come forward to report a potential illegality. Per Harrison, even under the broadest reading of Winslow, the job duties exception applies only to employees whose regular job responsibilities include reporting the specific wrongdoing in question and/or whose supervisors directed them to make the report. Appellant Br. at the employee's compensation, terms, conditions, location or privileges of employment because the employee followed the requirements of those sections. Me. Rev. Stat. tit. 26, § 833(3). One of the two referenced statutes requires a social worker like Harrison to report to DHHS (under certain circumstances) when she knows or has reasonable cause to suspect that an incapacitated or dependent adult has been or is likely to be abused, neglected or exploited. See id. tit. 22, § 3477(1). Granite Bay does not dispute that Harrison is required to report suspected abuse, neglect, or exploitation pursuant to § 3477. 14 The logical conclusion of this argument, although not stated as such in Harrison's brief, is that Blake trumps Winslow to the extent there is any conflict between them. - 24 - 18. Because no one told her to report to Olson or to DHHS, and because her detailed job description does not include filing DHHS reports [on] any of the substantive issues she reported to DHHS, id. at 20, the job duties exception does not bar her claim.15 Harrison and Granite Bay clearly have different conceptions of what we held in Winslow. And neither they nor the district judge are the only ones in Maine to have read Winslow as enshrining a job duties exception to the Act. See, e.g., Pippin v. Boulevard Motel Corp., No. 14-cv-00167, 2015 WL 4647919 (D. Me. 2015). Yet, we never so much as uttered the phrase job duties exception in Winslow, and Granite Bay's arguments in particular are based on a distorted understanding of that case. Accordingly, we must dive back into Winslow to clarify what it does and does not stand for. Our opinion in Winslow set forth its facts in pretty exacting detail, so we will repeat only those needed for our analysis. Winslow v. Aroostook County, 736 F.3d 23 (1st Cir. 15 Harrison's arguments rely exclusively on her reports (both internal and external) regarding the potential employment law violation, namely, Granite Bay's failure to pay its client-worker on time. She has opted to forgo any argument that her reports about the electricity shutoffs, missing window alarms, or understaffing in Portland count, too, so we deem waived any potential argument along those lines. See United States v. Zannino, 895 F.2d 1, 17 (1st Cir. 1990) ([I]ssues adverted to in a perfunctory manner, unaccompanied by some effort at developed argumentation, are deemed waived.). Thus, we focus solely on the wage issue. - 25 - 2013), involved the Executive Director of Aroostook County's Local Area I Workforce Investment Board, a state-created entity that received and administered certain federal funds. 736 F.3d at 2425. The Board had been set up in such a way that Winslow reported directly to the County instead of the Board itself. Id. at 25. Government regulators discovered this when they performed a compliance review and concluded the arrangement violated federal regulations: Winslow should have been reporting to the Board, not the County. Id. The key facts for our purposes are that the government, not Winslow herself, uncovered the potential violation of federal policies, and the government brought this to the attention of Winslow and her supervisor. See id. Winslow's own supervisor took steps to notify the relevant decisionmakers in the County and with the Board. Id. He instructed Winslow to disseminate her notes of the very meeting at which the government advised them of the reporting snafu. Id. This was followed up with a public meeting at which the issue was discussed, and the meeting minutes were posted on the internet soon afterwards. Id. at 26. In her suit, Winslow identified two communications she thought qualified for Whistleblower Act protection. The first was that email to Board members attaching her notes from the meeting with federal regulators at which they disclosed the problem. See id. at 25-26. The second was another email she sent to Board - 26 - members a couple weeks after the public meeting in which she expressed her thoughts about the situation. Id. In her suit, she alleged she was a whistleblower because the Board would not have known of the potential violation but for these two emails. Id. at 32. We soundly rejected this argument based on the facts in the record. After all, the evidence showed that Winslow sent her first email not because she wanted to expose an illegality, but because her supervisor (who, don't forget, was aware of it as well) told her to. And she sent this first email to exactly the people she had been instructed to loop in on the situation. Thus, because the only evidence was that Winslow was doing what she was told, there was nothing from which a finder of fact could infer she personally intended to blow the whistle or expose an illegality by sending this particular email. By the time she sent the second email, the problem had been discussed in a public forum and the minutes of the meeting had been posted online for all the world to see. Indeed, the undisputed facts made it clear that Winslow's supervisor, along with the County itself and others involved with the Investment Board, were not trying to bury the problem of the violation discovered and reported to them by the feds, but to acknowledge it and deal with it. Id. at 32. Therefore, Winslow's second email, addressed as it was to individuals who were already (or who - 27 - easily could have become) aware of the problem, was clearly not intended to expose a potential illegality. Rather, Winslow's intent was to make sure her voice was heard and her opinion considered. In sum, the lack of evidence in the record showing that Winslow was motivated by whistleblowing concerns, and not some broad-based job duties exception, is why we concluded no reasonable jury could find that she had engaged in protected whistleblowing activity. Moreover, none of the cases we relied on in Winslow to buttress our reasoning espoused a judicially-created job duties exception to a whistleblower protection statute. Nor do any of those cases support concluding that the nature of an employee's job duties, standing alone, may make that employee ineligible as a matter of law for whistleblower protection. We'll explain. Winslow cited the district court's decision in Capalbo v. Kris-Way Truck Leasing, Inc., 821 F. Supp. 2d 397, 419 (D. Me. 2011), for the proposition that the usual rule in Maine is that a plaintiff's reports are not whistleblowing if it is part of his or her job responsibilities to make such reports, particularly when instructed to do so by a superior. Winslow, 736 F.3d at 32. Describing this as the usual rule, however, is far from holding that an employee is, as a matter of law, wholly ineligible for - 28 - statutory whistleblower protection whenever her employer implements its own reporting requirements. And Capalbo did not suggest that this should be so. In Capalbo, the district court reviewed the record evidence and concluded that [n]o reasonable trier of fact could conclude that the reports . . . which [the employer] required of [the plaintiff], constituted conduct in opposition to an unlawful employment practice of [the employer]. Capalbo, 821 F. Supp. 2d at 419. We find the in opposition to concept and phraseology helpful in this arena because an employee who passes on information as nothing more than a required step of carrying out his or her job duties intends to do her job, not blow the whistle on a potential or actual illegality. Capalbo's review and analysis of the record evidence before it simply underscores the need to look at the unique facts of each case bearing on an employee's motivation in making a report that is later claimed to have constituted protected whistleblowing activity. It did not purport to recognize a broad job duties exception to the Act's protections. Thus, Winslow's citation to Capalbo cannot be construed as an endorsement of the job duties exception espoused by Granite Bay. Furthermore, Winslow looked to several non-Maine cases as persuasive authority, but the reasoning in those cases does not support the creation of a job duties exception. We'll go through them one by one to explain why not. - 29 - Winslow first pointed to the Minnesota Supreme Court's opinion in Kidwell v. Sybaritic, Inc., 784 N.W.2d 220 (Minn. 2010), as standing for the proposition that, when a company's in-house counsel advises the company on compliance issues, 'the lawyer is not sending a report for the purpose of exposing an illegality and the lawyer is not blowing the whistle.' Winslow, 736 F.3d at 32 (quoting Kidwell, 784 N.W.2d at 231). The Minnesota court relied on the facts that the alleged whistleblowing consisted of an email that in-house counsel sent to members of management, and that he had previously discussed legal matters with each of these people. Kidwell, 784 N.W.2d at 230-31. Therefore, no inference can be drawn that his purpose was other than to do his job of advising his client. Id. at 231. The court was quick to point out that the plaintiff presented no evidence that he sent the email to law enforcement or to the government, id., an observation which raises the possibility that a report along those lines (i.e., an external report) could have constituted protected whistleblowing activity. Moreover, the Kidwell court made it clear that its conclusion was dictated by the facts in the record rather than a general exception to whistleblower protection. It began its analysis by reject[ing] as too broad the . . . conclusion that, as a matter of law, an employee does not engage in protected conduct under the [Minnesota] whistleblower act if the employee makes a report in fulfillment of the duties of his or her job. - 30 - Id. at 226-27 (internal quotation marks omitted). The court also stated in no uncertain terms that, while the nature of an employee's job duties may have some bearing on whether she had engaged in protected conduct, the whistleblower statute does not contain a job duties exception. Id. at 227 (emphasis added). Obviously then, when we cited Kidwell we did not thereby graft onto Maine's Whistleblower Act a job duties exception squarely rejected by that case. Nor could we have relied on its reasoning to craft a job duties exception of our own making. Winslow next looked at a case out of the Federal Circuit interpreting the federal whistleblower protection act. We described the case as holding that a plaintiff whose job was to monitor and report on farms' compliance with federal law did no more than carry out his required everyday job responsibilities when he reported some farms as being out of compliance with governmental conservation plans. Winslow, 736 F.3d at 32 (quoting Willis v. Dep't of Agric., 141 F.3d 1139, 1144 (Fed. Cir. 1998)). In that case, the Federal Circuit recognized that the federal whistleblower protection act is intended to protect government employees who risk their own personal job security for the advancement of the public good by disclosing abuses by government personnel. Willis, 141 F.3d at 1144. The plaintiff's job as a District Conservationist with the United States Department of Agriculture required him to review the conservation compliance of - 31 - farms within his area. Id. The plaintiff inspected 77 farms, found that 16 of them were not in compliance with the USDA's conservation plans, and then tried to assert a whistleblower claim based upon his announcement of the non-compliance findings. The court was unimpressed with the plaintiff's whistleblower claim and observed that, [i]n reporting some of [the farms] as being out of compliance, he did no more than carry out his required everyday job responsibilities. Id. at 1144. Thus, in no way did [his report] place [the plaintiff] at personal risk for the benefit of the public good and cannot itself constitute a protected disclosure under the [whistleblower protection act]. Id. In other words, the facts there would not have allowed the jury to find that the plaintiff was motivated by any desire to blow the proverbial whistle. Finally, we cited our own opinion in Claudio-Gotay v. Becton Dickinson Caribe, Ltd., 375 F.3d 99, 102-03 (1st Cir. 2004), a case interpreting the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and involving reports of alleged overtime violations, to say that an employee who reports violations of laws or other requirements as part of his job is not engaging in protected activity for the purposes of an anti-retaliation provision. Winslow, 736 F.3d at 32. But in Claudio-Gotay, the plaintiff's job duties included approving invoices documenting the [employees'] hours worked and their corresponding pay, and when he reported potential - 32 - violations of the FLSA, he made them to his employer and in furtherance of his job responsibilities. 375 F.3d at 102. The evidence in that case showed that he was concerned with protecting [his employer], not asserting rights adverse to it. Id. Accordingly, we concluded that he did not engage in protected activity under the FLSA. Id. at 103. Importantly, none of these three cases relied on a generally-applicable exception to whistleblower protection. Kidwell expressly repudiated even the notion of such an exception. Instead, in each of these cases the court looked at the actual evidence speaking to an employee's motivation in making each report at issue. Each report was made internally, not to a governmental agency with oversight authority. The common refrain is that each plaintiff couldn't get whistleblower protection because he or she failed to present evidence that a report was made to shed light on and in opposition to an employer's potential illegal acts rather than as simply part of his or her everyday job duties. So, having gone through our Winslow opinion and the cases on which we relied there, we can see that under Winslow -- properly understood -- the employee's motivation in making a report is critical. This reading of Winslow is in accordance with Maine law, as Maine's Law Court recently reaffirmed the importance of an employee's motivation in making a putatively-protected report. In Cormier v. Genesis Healthcare LLC, No. CUM-14-216, 2015 WL 8730694 - 33 - (Me. Dec. 15, 2015), the court had the opportunity to discuss Section 833(1)(B) of the Act, which provides protection to a whistleblower who, acting in good faith reports what the employee has reasonable cause to believe is a condition or practice that would put at risk the health or safety of any other individual.16 See id. at . Maine's highest court explained that [a] complaint is made in good faith if the employee's motivation is to stop a dangerous condition. Id. (emphasis added). We are, therefore, confident in our conclusion that the critical point when analyzing whether a plaintiff has made out the first element of a Whistleblower Act claim -- engaging in activity protected by the Act -- is an employee's motivation in making a particular report or complaint. Thus, and although a particular employee's job duties may be relevant in discerning his or her actual motivation in reporting information, those duties are not dispositive of the question. In other words, if an employee is just doing his or her job by passing information to others in the organization, he or she may not have intended to engage in protected whistleblowing activity by bringing to light an unlawful (or potentially unlawful) activity or occurrence. This interpretation is, we believe, 16 We note that this good faith requirement (which appears throughout Section 1 of the Act) is the only conceivable textual hook for a possible job duties exception. - 34 - consistent not only with Cormier, but also with the policy goals underlying Maine's enactment of the Whistleblower Act. After all, and as we recognized in Winslow, the Act embodies Maine's larger 'statutory public policy against discharge in retaliation for reporting illegal acts, a right to the discharged employee, and a remedial scheme to vindicate that right.' Winslow, 736 F.3d at 30 (quoting Fuhrmann v. Staples Office Superstore E., Inc., 58 A.3d 1083, 1097 (Me. 2012)) (further citations omitted). Indeed, we noted in Winslow that the plaintiff's emails were sent either under direct instructions from her supervisor (i.e., the first one) or because she thought it was among her responsibilities to do so (i.e., the second one letting everyone know what she thought about the situation). See 736 F.3d at 32. With respect to the first email, Winslow did not go out on a limb and risk her job by complying with her supervisor's instructions, see Willis, 141 F.3d at 1143 (observing that the federal whistleblower act is designed to protect employees who risk their own personal job security for the benefit of the public), and there was no evidence to conclude that either email constituted conduct in opposition to an unlawful employment practice, see Capalbo, 821 F. Supp. 2d at 419. At bottom, we upheld summary judgment in Winslow not because of a job duties exception, but because Winslow failed to come forward with evidence from which a - 35 - reasonable jury could conclude that she had intended to engage in any protected whistleblower conduct. Now, getting back to Harrison's claim, it is apparent that the district court (working, of course, without the benefit of the Maine Law Court's Cormier opinion) simply misunderstood, perhaps understandably so, what we actually held in Winslow. Proceeding from its view that Winslow turned on the nature of the plaintiff's job duties, the district court concluded that Harrison is not entitled to whistleblower protection thanks to the uncontested evidence that Granite Bay's reporting policies are applicable to all employees. As such, the judge did not find it necessary to analyze the record evidence bearing on Harrison's motivation in making her internal and DHHS reports. But the existence of such a general reporting policy, though perhaps relevant, is not dispositive on the question of whether a plaintiff has engaged in protected whistleblowing activity. The district judge's erroneous shortcutting of the analysis requires us to remand for the district court to re-analyze Harrison's claims with the aid of today's clarification of Winslow.17 17Our explanation of Winslow renders it unnecessary for us to consider Granite Bay's or Harrison's other arguments premised on the existence of a job duties exception. Specifically, we have no need to determine under which specific section of the Act -- Section 1 or Section 3 -- Harrison's claims fall, or whether some reports are governed by Section 1 and others by Section 3. Because these questions are beyond the scope of what we decide today, we do not address whether or how our reasoning in Winslow, - 36 - Before concluding, we note that Granite Bay also relies on the long-standing principle that we may affirm a result on any grounds supported by the record. In doing so, it argues that Harrison's claim nevertheless fails for lack of evidence on the third prong. That is, Granite Bay says Harrison has not come forward with evidence that would allow a reasonable jury to find a causal connection between any protected whistleblowing activity and her termination. Harrison disagrees. She argues that the relatively short time that elapsed between her reports and her termination goes towards showing that she was fired because of her protected activity. She also tells us the evidence shows that her concerns were ignored; that she experienced shoddy treatment from Olson and Robinson following her DHHS report; that when Robinson finally did sit down with her, it was not to discuss the substance of her concerns (as Mumpini had instructed him to do) but to admonish her for emailing Mumpini to let him know of her report; and that she was singled out for termination after the December meeting, even though she was just one of multiple people participating in the conversation and despite Granite Bay having told her that she was doing good work. Harrison believes these facts, when viewed which was confined to Section 1 claims, see 736 F.3d at 30, may bear on the analysis of a mandated reporter's claim for whistleblower protection under the Act's Section 3. - 37 - together, would allow a jury to conclude that Granite Bay terminated her as payback for her protected activity in violation of the Act. We do not reach these arguments in light of our conclusion that the district court committed an error of law with respect to its analysis of the first prong of Harrison's claim. Because this error requires a re-do on the first prong, it makes no sense for us to skip ahead and talk about the third. And we decline to do so.