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Flint Construction Co. v. Hall12/30/2004
c injury to his back so that appropriate treatment could be started. Whether Flint's stated reason for Hall's discharge was false was also a jury question that the jury resolved in Hall's favor. The jury had before it not only contradictory testimony from witnesses who testified, but also the evidence about the various reasons Flint proffered for Hall's discharge.
A review of the record reflects not only that the evidence concerning the critical issue of why Hall was discharged is far from clear, but also that Flint's reasons shifted and changed with time, especially after Hall instituted this litigation. Initially, Flint told both Hall and the Georgia Department of Labor that Hall was discharged because it had no work for him to do, despite the fact that the Bastrop project had not been completed when Hall was discharged. After Hall initiated this action against Flint, the decision-makers testified in depositions. In their depositions, Good, Fuller, and James Eaves all said that Hall was discharged for two reasons--because he had expressed a preference for construction work over installing plastic pipe and no construction work was available, and because of his poor attendance on the job . Good stated that he did not recall giving Hall permission in January 1996 to take some time off while work was slow in order to allow his knee to heal. The decision-makers all testified that they did not know the reasons for Hall's extended absence during the early part of 1996, that his attendance had been a problem for Flint for some time, and that his leaving work early and missing work on the Bastrop project created morale problems with the other employees on that job, many of whom were working seven days a week. James Eaves testified at length about the problems he said were caused by what he described as Hall's unexplained absences from job sites, stating that Hall often left a job site without telling anyone where he was going or why he was leaving. During their trial testimony, all three men insisted that during the meeting in which they decided to discharge Hall, they talked not only about his absences, but also his visiting a gambling casino while he should have been at work. James Eaves specifically stated that "the last straw was when we found out that he was at the casino when he was supposed to be at work."
On cross-examination, the decision-makers acknowledged that no one ever asked Hall whether he would be willing to work installing plastic pipe, as he had done in the past, if the construction work he said he preferred was not available. As previously noted, Good, Fuller, and James Eaves never mentioned in their depositions the issue of Hall's allegedly visiting a gambling casino while he should have been at work, even though they had been asked to state all the reasons that motivated his discharge. All continued to insist at trial that they had discussed the casino at the time of Hall's discharge and that Hall's presence there had been a factor in the decision to discharge him. Even though the decision-makers testified about the problems Hall's absences from job sites had caused, it is undisputed that there is no documentary evidence criticizing his work and that the only documentary evidence criticizing his attendance consists of the letters from Good and James Eaves written in 1996 and the memo from Kenneth Eaves written shortly before Hall was discharged in 1997. Indeed, the decision-makers testified that Hall did excellent work, although they qualified that description by adding "when he was on the job," and confirmed that his work had not been criticized in any of his performance evaluations. In insisting that Hall had been discharged because Flint did not have any "work [Hall] wanted to do" and
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