Missed deadline sinks former GE manager’s whistleblower-retaliation claim

After his exit, GE placed him on leave and gave him a “protected service period” until June 30, 2020, during which he could apply for other roles. He applied for dozens – by his own filing, “66 applications” – and got no offers. In a June 2020 complaint to GE, he said he had “been blacklisted as a snitch for reporting compliance violations.” GE again investigated, gathered more than seventy witness statements, and, per the ruling, “found no evidence that [his] past compliance concerns played any role in the decision-making process for the jobs at issue.” 

In December 2020, he filed a Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblower complaint – a claim under the federal law that protects workers who report certain corporate wrongdoing – with Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The agency, an administrative law judge, and the Department of Labor’s Administrative Review Board all dismissed it as too late. 

The timing was the whole case. SOX gives workers 180 days to file after they become aware of a violation. The court held the termination claim started running on April 29, 2019 – the day he got notice, not his last day of work. His refusal-to-rehire claim, the court said, accrued once he knew or should have known GE was refusing to rehire him, which it put at March 16, 2020. Both deadlines had long passed. 

One judge disagreed in part. The dissenting judge argued that each separate decision not to rehire the worker was its own act with its own clock, meaning at least four rejections after June 20, 2020 should not have been ruled out of time. 

The panel also rejected his bid to pause the deadline, finding no proof GE had hidden facts that kept him from filing in time.