For better or worse, until pink slip do us part

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

Divorce can be hell, but it can be even more hellish if the husband and wife work together.

A perfect example of this is the drama publicly unfolding between the estranged couple that ran the Los Angeles Dodgers together, team owner Frank McCourt and his wife and former team CEO Jamie McCourt.

The husband fired the wife last month. She went to court to get her job back but lost her bid to be reinstated Thursday during a hearing in the couple's messy divorce proceedings.

It’s McCourt vs. McCourt, and it’s also a cautionary tale for all couples considering sharing a bed and a workplace.

“You’re taking career, finances and your key relationship and adding additional stress,” says Greg McCann, who teaches family business at Stetson University. “Over half of marriages end in divorce; why would you add this stress to it. Most couples probably shouldn’t do it.”

You don’t have to tell Karey Bohmer, a project manager for US Airways in Phoenix, how difficult it can be.

Bohmer met her husband Daniel, an airplane mechanic, on the job. Although they now work in different departments, they have worked together and for each other for the past 15 years.

“We’ve had supervisors try to pit us against each other, accused us of favoritism, and had lots of ugly rumors spread around about us,” she explained. “We’ve also been divorced and remarried, and a big part of our divorce was because of work.”

While they've learned how to work together, Karey Bohmer says day-to-day issues make it tough on both of them.

“Some days we hate each other. We’re carpooling together, living together,” she says. “When I get home, I want to leave work at work. He wants to talk about work, but there are a lot of people I get along with that he doesn’t get along with.”

There’s also the issue of having too many eggs in one basket. Layoffs have plagued the aviation industry, including at US Airways. “It’s constantly in the back of your mind,” she says. “If layoffs hit, we could both be unemployed.”

Firing your spouse
Andrea Sittig-Rolf, who runs a sales training company called Sittig Inc. in Redmond, Wash., ending up pink-slipping her husband Brian after a year of him working for her. “I decided I’d rather keep him as a husband than as an employee, so I had to fire him,” she says.

She asked her husband to join her team at Sittig after he was laid off from a sales job at Waste Management in 2005. But soon their divergent personalities caused friction.

“Brian is the kind of person that wants a plan in place. I’m the kind of person that leaps and waits for the net to appear,” she says. She started bossing her husband around and became “mean and controlling.” 

It was starting to impact the couple’s relationship, so she made the tough decision to let her hubby go. “I said, ‘I can’t do this. I don’t like what it’s doing to our relationship.’ ”

But it’s not all doom and gloom for life partners who also want to be work partners.

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