{"id":85,"date":"2009-12-10T23:18:43","date_gmt":"2009-12-11T06:18:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.constructonomics.com\/blog\/?p=85"},"modified":"2009-12-11T10:15:46","modified_gmt":"2009-12-11T17:15:46","slug":"when-does-termination-become-wrongful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/10\/when-does-termination-become-wrongful\/","title":{"rendered":"When Does Termination Become Wrongful?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The “Great Recession” has been a godsend for some companies that were looking for a r\"fired\"eason to get rid of people they just didn’t like, but didn’t have a good enough reason to fire.\u00a0 They could just lay them off due to lack of work and blame it on the economy.\u00a0 It’s like a get out of jail free card for companies that feel they made a bad hiring choice or aren’t getting\u00a0what they think they deserve out of a particular employee.\u00a0\u00a0It’s so much easier than confronting the employee and collectively working toward improvement.\u00a0 The question\u00a0is if this should be allowed, or if there should be something stopping companies from discarding employees even though they have plenty of work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was one of the unlucky folks laid off during this little dip in the economic cycle.\u00a0 But surprisingly, the hardest part of it was not getting canned, but rather the fact that I didn’t have a network of contacts built up in the area to call upon when I was looking for work.\u00a0 I moved about two thirds of the way across the country to take the job and was then discarded after 11 months.\u00a0 This didn’t leave me much time to build my professional network, as they like to say.\u00a0 Without knowing anyone in the area, I was like the bastard child at the family reunion when I went out looking for work.\u00a0\u00a0If you are one of those legitimate kids in the family, trust me, it’s not a good feeling.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

I didn’t think it was fair to\u00a0lure someone to your company with a high salary, promise them economic downturn mitigation, kick their butt for 11 months, make a ton of profit, and then dump them on the sidewalk.\u00a0 But really, who’s stopping\u00a0them?\u00a0\u00a0If that is the strategy that makes them the most profit, why would they not do it?\u00a0 It certainly won’t be morals, ethics, or genuine concern for the well-being of others.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

I decided to get a fresh, but sometimes cynical, perspective on this\u00a0at the chat forum Contractor Talk<\/a>.\u00a0 The responses\u00a0ranged from, “Times are Tough” to, “Stop\u00a0playing the virgin that got felt up on prom night” and “Wow, talk about entitlement”.\u00a0 Nobody was overly sympathetic, however, I wasn’t expecting a strong does of sympathy.\u00a0 Rather, I was trying to get an outsider’s\u00a0perspective of the situation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My biggest issue\u00a0was that even though they said I was laid off due to\u00a0lack of work,\u00a0I was actually fired for reasons that I am unaware.\u00a0 I had a six month performance review written into my offer letter that was\u00a0never given to me even after following up at the six month mark.\u00a0 If there were performance issues, they\u00a0definitely should have communicated the issue and\u00a0given me\u00a0the\u00a0opportunity to make corrections.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My biggest mistake in the whole deal was not getting a severance package written into the contract.\u00a0 This would have kept them from hiring me\u00a0if they\u00a0thought I wasn’t going to make it anyway,\u00a0and it would have also kept them from firing me just to save a buck in the short term.\u00a0 Of course you couldn’t get that now, but back\u00a0in the go-go days of\u00a0early 2008, you probably could.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I think that there should be some kind of monetary punishment for companies that lay off a lot of people.\u00a0\u00a0The small incremental increase in unemployment insurance premiums\u00a0just isn’t enough.\u00a0 So what they do is hire a bunch of people and then fire, ahem, lay-off those they don’t like.\u00a0 It’s like they’re trying to build an\u00a0army of gladiators or something.\u00a0 I think there should be a tax for\u00a0laying off employees which is proportional to how much profit a company makes that year.\u00a0 I’d love to see that one get pushed through Congress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The “Great Recession” has been a godsend for some companies that were looking for a reason to get rid of people they just didn’t like, but didn’t have a good enough reason to fire.\u00a0 They could just lay them off due to lack of work and blame it on the economy.\u00a0 It’s like a get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,4,5,21,22],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-construction-blog","tag-construction-economics","tag-john-poole","tag-termination","tag-wrongful"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/89"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}