Examples Of Wrongful Termination

The article “What is Wrongful Termination?” from “The Balance.com” is intended to educate the reader about wrongful termination. The reason for looking into this is simple. If a company would like to grow in the future termination of and hiring of employees is necessary. This article goes into detail regarding wrongful termination. There are no specific laws associated with this issue in the majority of the United States. In fact, employment at will is the most common protector of a business from a lawsuit regarding wrongful termination. Employment at will parties involved are equally given the option to end employment at any time. There does not need to be a specified reason when ending this interpersonal agreement. This does not don’t only protect the business, but also the employee. In December of 2011 “CBS Money Watch” published an article indicting that 84 percent of all Americans were looking to leave their job. Most employees would just like to retain other employment in order to move forward and advance in their careers. If an employee would like to do this they also are aloud to terminate the relationship between themselves and their current employer.
However, not even employment at will can protect a company from all lawsuits in this area.
The most common of which is discrimination. If there is discrimination of any form to any of the protected groups the company is held accountable and this will be considered wrongful termination. The information noted in this article from “The Balance” is supported on page 276 under the headline “At-Will Supported”. This excerpt discusses at-will employment utilization in handbooks. Employers are welcome to address specific issues of potential termination, but must be careful to not exclude their at-will employment rights in the process. What this means is that if an employer phrases their rules for termination in a way that can be misconstrued as the only way a termination can occur this can lead to a
lawsuit. The second largest incident revolving around wrongful termination is breaching a contract. If a company or employer breaches any part of a contract a wrongful termination suit may be filed. For example, sales personnel may be contracted out to various companies and almost all will have a contract indicating how many clientele they need to acquire for the company. Sales personnel are often required to maintain these relationships and retain them for the company. If a salesperson fails to meet a contractually obligated the employee/employer relationship will be terminated. However, if the sales person is reaching all goals and is cut from the company he or she will then have a valid wrongful termination claim. Another reason for wrongful termination would be an employee being fired due to their unwillingness to participate in any illegal act requested by the company. If a company asks an employee to lie in a court of law and threatens to dismiss this employee if they are not willing to do so this employer may be sued for wrongful termination. Termination is a necessary part of any growing business. If the needs of the business grow and the employee base does not accommodate those needs termination may need to be enforced. If there is no knowledge base for termination in general wrongful termination is invadable. This coupled with the fact that if termination is not handled within the lines of legality and straight forward policy is not used accompany may be strangled in legal fees. Wrongful termination cannot only potentially cause the company a mass of legal fees, but can also ruin your company’s reputation and futured. Even if your company does win the lawsuit, future employees and possible customers may hear of this lawsuit becoming reluctant to do or produce business for this company. This makes wrongful termination knowledge essential to our Legal Issues course.