Good News from the Enemy: Our Advantages & Their Strategy to Beat Them

Link to the video we're talking about this week...
https://youtu.be/DR6BbFg3Ia0

Apparently more employment discrimination cases are getting past summary judgement and into court. ‘Bout time, right?
In the video I linked above, the speaker shares a couple of advantages we employees have, especially at jury trials, and some tips to help employers neutralize those advantages.

Knowing our advantages can give us a confidence boost. Knowing their strategy helps us paper for it. And we can use the tips in this video ourselves.

Main ideas:
- Juries are WORKERS like us, so they tend to be sympathetic to our side. So are a lot of the people we encounter in this process! Most of them are CAPABLE of empathizing with us, if we can reach them.

- "Just the Facts" is a TERRIBLE strategy. Most of us need a context for evaluating the facts. If the context isn’t given to us, we create it by making up stories in our heads- about what MIGHT HAVE happened. Then we try to fit the facts to those stories, to try to figure out which story is more likely to be true.

- Discrimination cases involve a lot of facts, so context is even more important for us to give our listeners that.

-Stories are context. The speaker uses the OJ Simpson trial as an example and encourages employers to use the same strategy as OJ Simpson's defense team.
- Employees have two big advantages: We have good stories and we get to tell them BEFORE our employers get to tell theirs.

The speaker gives them employers some tips for creating a good story based on Kenneth Burke’s Five Elements of Drama, also known as the Burkes Pentad. This video covers the Pentad briefly, but for more detail, check this out: https://natureofwriting.com/courses/introduction-to-rhetoric/lessons/burkes-pentad/

A few final notes:
-OUR STORY should come from OUR PERSPECTIVE.
- The POWER of our story is in how well these elements go TOGETHER to paint a compelling and credible picture of what we went through.
y didn’t have a good story to make the jurors sympathetic to their position.

---- All opinions are my own. Not LEGAL advice. Just me sharing my perspective as an employee who went through the EEOC claims process & won. I am not an expert at all things EEOC. While I do my best to be factual in my observations, viewers should assume that all observations or statements are ALLEGEDLY. *Never trust your fate to a YouTube content creator. Do your own research, pilot your own vessel. *

--- Background photo on thumb courtesy of searchable NASA Image Library: https://images.nasa.gov/