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.

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