Suppose that in a civil suit, it emerges that the defendant, an employee of Company X (or maybe Company X itself is being sued) committed gross negligence and that his/her actions led to tremendous emotional distress or loss of money or other harm (but no deaths, etc.)
Can the court/judge order the employer to have the employee fired? To be sure, Company X probably wouldn’t need the court’s prompting to give such an employee the pink slip, but is there such legal authority?
No.
The answer to the simple question is yes: a judge can order that a company terminate an employee. I doubt that can ever be a remedy for the specific example of some giant act of gross negligence.
But I can easily picture another type of legal action that could result in such an order: Jack works for Up The Hill Enterprises, and signed an agreement that if he resigns, he cannot accept employment for one year with any company in the same city that works in the same industry and compete for the same contracts as UTHE. JillCo is a subcontractor to UTHE on some contracts and competes against them for others in the same industry. JillCo’s subcontracting agreement with UTHE forbids the recruitment or hiring of any UTHE employees.
Jack resigns and accepts a job as business development director with JillCo.
UTHE’s lawsuit against Jack and JillCo could easily result in a court ordering that Jack’s employment be terminated.
I’m not so sure. I think the Court can award damages, I don’t think the Court has the power to force a termination. I don’t have time to research right now, but I’ll stick with my “no” answer above.
The only exception I can think of is pursuant to some sort of “consent decree” where the Court has taken over some kind of authority (over a police department or school district, for example)
Possibly, yes. But not “easily.” Specific performance is available typically only as a last resort in almost any action in contract. In this scenario, there are far less restrictive remedies available - reassignment of Jack to a different locale or division within JillCo, an injunction prohibiting Jack from using UTHE’s trade secrets or confidential customer lists, etc.
Not my area of expertise, so I’ll defer, but it seems to me possible to craft a hypo to vitiate the utility of those remedies – JillCo has no other locales/divisions, for example, and UPTE shows that it would be onerous to prove use of their trade secrets.
Okay, I’ve done *a little *research.
This blogtalks about one case (in the Taizhou Intermediate People’s Court) where the court did order termination of employment. It also, however, makes it sound quite rare:
That case orders the employee to terminate his employment, not the employer to fire the employee.
I think that’s why Bricker’s hypothetical included the subcontracting contract between JillCo and UpTheHill. JillCo can’t be held bound by Jack’s contract, but they can be held bound by their own.
what about typhoid mary? she was forced, more than once to leave her job>
mc
i just realized that, as oakminster mentions, there may be a legal difference between ordering someone to leave, and ordering someone fired. but the practical outcome is the same.
and of course to OP mentioned that there were no deaths in the scenario, so. . .nm
mc
Looks like that was on orders of New York public health officials, not a court: Mary Mallon - Wikipedia
Many professional occupations require holding a certificate or license to do the job.
Thus if a Judge orders a lawyer disbarred, or a doctors medical license pulled, or a bridge designers civil engineering certificate removed, these people are likely to lose their job. (I suppose a law firm could keep the disbarred lawyer as an employee, but that seems unlikely. At the least, their salary would probably be reduced.)
Heck, it’s common for Judges to order suspension of drivers licenses for people convicted of DWI offenses; if the drunk driver is a professional truck driver that likely ends their job at any trucking company I know of.
So the Judge hasn’t explicitly order the employee fired, but they have made it impossible for the person to continue doing their job.
A (single) judge cannot “order a lawyer disbarred” in the US. Generally, only the supreme court of the state where the lawyer practices can do that. A judge can remove a lawyer from a case under certain circumstances, or even prohibit the lawyer from appearing in front of him, and disciplinary referrals from judges are generally taken very seriously, but they can’t just say, “you’re disbarred!”
Most disbarred lawyers (and this is based on personal experience, but I have quite a lot of it) are personal injury or other civil plaintiffs’ attorneys who don’t handle their clients’ trust monies appropriately. That can mean anything from repeated accounting irregularities to outright theft. Frequently, they “sell” their practices including their existing cases to other PI attorneys under a wink-and-nod agreement to work for the new lawyer(s) as “paralegals.” Sometimes they just keep practicing and hope nobody notices they’ve been disbarred.
It occurs to me that we’ve missed part of the point of the OP. In the specific situation described, no court has the authority to order that the employee be fired. The “remedy,” such as it is, would be that the company risks further liability if it retains the negligent employee and they screw up again.
But “suspension of license” is an explicit sentencing option for DUI and other motor vehicle offenses. There is no such sentence option for “You’re Fired” (except impeachment of certain officials, and that’s not by a ral judge).
IANAL, but from what I’ve read, and comments above - a judge can either decide a financial penalty /damages for breach of contract or improper conduct, can void a contract (i.e. for contracted worker) or can issue an injunction forbidding certain action.
Again, IANAL, but it seems to me that judges generally avoid broad injunctions; so the activity forbidden is specific to the perceived offense. The employee is not have have work that brings him in contact with the defendants, or allows him to operate the machinery that caused the damage, etc. I was temped to write “or for example, write stories about the defendants for his employer’s newspaper” but then you stray into first amendment issues.
Arbitration hearings between employers and unions can result in an arbitrator saying an employee must be reinstated (insufficient grounds to fire him) but I never heard of the reverse, that they order someone fired. Usually the employee is already out the door and the worst the arbitrator(s) can do is confirm the firing. And they are not usually judges.
I find in Virginia Roanoke Engineering Sales Co. v. Rosenbaum, 290 SE 2d 882 (Va 1982):
That sounds like just quoting the contract’s non-compete agreement and ordering it be enforced.
(I seem to recall reading that it can be difficult to get something like that enforced in Canada. A person cannot be deprived of a right to make a living, without fair compensation. So unless the agreement is very limited in time and distance - i.e. can’t open competing dental practice within 10 miles for the next 12 months - it is unfair if to overly broad.)
OTOH, too, it sounds like the judgement there is against Rosenbaum, not the company he now presumably works for. It sounds like he’s the one ordered to do whatever, not the company he now works for. (It’s a lawsuit v. Rosenbaum, not his employer). So the judge is saying “you promised not to accept employment like this, now keep your promise.”
(I wonder how that would work if Rosenbaum telecommuted to a competitor from Canada. Presumably they would have to sue him in Canada and try to enforce the clause there, where such clauses cannot be as broad…?)
We had something similar where I used to work. The contract programming employees had a clause saying they could not go work directly for a customer for 6 months. One guy contracted to us quit them and we hired him. The contract company (who paid about half what we did, no benefits) complained and threatened to sue. Our boss laughed and told them “go ahead. Oh, wait, you can’t. We didn’t sign, he did. Sue him, see if you win. We’re the only game in town and within a hundred miles for someone with his skill set, so the court will never side with you.”
More common in this situation is for your company to say to the contracting company “do you ever want to have any contracts placed with us in the future?” That will usually make the contracting company back down. Smarter contracting companies will counter by allowing the hiring but asking for the same placement fee that an employment agency gets.
That is true in most places. Non-compete agreements are rarely enforced for public policy reasons (competition good, limiting free movement of labor bad) and enforced only very narrowly if at all.
So an agreement that provides that Doctor X may not work for a competing gynecology practice anywhere in State will almost never be enforced. “Anywhere in Town for 2 years,” maybe.
The enjoined party there was the employee, not the new employer. The employer was named as an appellee in the case style but the injunction requested at the trial level was against the employee.
The portion you quoted also indicates there was no injunction against the employer; it says the appellee was to be enjoined “from violating the non-competition provisions of the employment contract,” which the employer by definition could not violate as it was never a party to it.