Do you work for the government or a private employer? Are you a member of a union that has a collective bargaining agreement with the employer? If the answer to either one of those is yes you may have more protection than most employees do.

For the nonunion employee in a private company, there are fewer protections against this sort of problem. However, depending on the nature of the discussions you and your co-workers have had regarding the company romance it is possible that those conversations and the reports of them to HR might be protected activity under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Retaliation by the employer against employees for protected activity can result in fines by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and subject the employer to a lawsuit for damages. A lot of employers do not understand that the NLRA covers more activity than just union organizing. Employers must be careful about retaliation for any activity between two or more employees that might be regarded as activity meant to try to improve working conditions.

I disagree that going to HR is always useless. That depends very much on the particular company and how strong its HR department is. Perhaps the HR departments of most of the insurance industry in which Jack worked sucked, which would account for his very negative views of them (which he’s expressed often here). I too have seen some HR organizations that were pretty terrible. But I’ve also seen some that were very good and would indeed help employees with their workplace issues. HR, of course, can’t fix everything and usually doesn’t have the power to directly overrule your boss. But a good HR rep will point out to your boss when he or she is doing something that might get the company in hot water legally. And in this case, going to HR may be exactly what they needed to do to establish that they concerned that this relationship is affecting their working conditions and they are trying to make that better by using the processes in the company that are available to them. That can help establish a case for a NLRA violation later if retaliation for the reporting occurs. Hopefully the HR reps will tell your boss to tread carefully in asserting “consequences” for your failure to name the other employees. Again, much depends on the exact details of what has been happening.