If you are lt go without cause in Canada, the question is - how much is fair compensation. Unlike the USA’s right-to-“work” laws, settlements in Canada could (once upon a time) run up to 2 years’ pay depending on age, years of service, how specialized, job market, etc. If the employer was acting in bad faith, worse. As one of my former bosses said, discussing layoff settlements - the HR people’s job is to offer as little as possible, but not so little that you sue.
So I would accept the $800,000 number with the warning that odds are the cases were spectacular, or we are mostly discussing people in the golden parachute club, where even in the USA, even fired with cause, the separation pay (“golden handshake”) is quite high. As is evident from the news and water cooler gossip, nasty internal politics is often involved when the higher-ups walk the plank; so the dispute over facts and their merit can lead to interesting litigation, expensive lawyers, and big settlements.
Even for union members - I recall a few cases where the full arbitration process took almost a year - meaning the fellow was reinstated, if they won, with almost a year of back pay.
Most HR departments will not say why a former employee left the company due to the liability issues mentioned. A former employee may sue for loss of potential income or something like that. It is not in the best interest of your former employer to prevent you from future success. HR is all about protecting the best interests of the company, and legal issues are number one on the list. They are done with you and you are SEP (somebody else’s problem).
They will confirm the date period of employment with “that’s about right” and will confirm salary range with the same sort of response without providing actual numbers, “that’s about right”.
If the HR department of the new company that is checking out the references of a potential new hire are savvy enough to ask the question, “Is he eligible for re-hire?”, and they get a no, that means he was fired. If yes then he left on other terms.
That is about it as far as your work history following you to a new job.
Not really. I know of several companies where “eligible for rehire” would be “no” due to issues about the person’s performance. They had punctuality or effort issues not enough to warrant dismissal, but enough that their boss was saying “thank God they’re gone and I don’t want them back.” In fact, some companies the rehire option is a discretion left to the manager, and if there was a personality clash or the boss was a dick - no rehire. My wife had a job where one Christmas help was quite good, she wanted the person to be hired year-round; but HR said according to a different division, the person was not eligible for rehire as of 15 years ago, and they could not even say why internally; she heard stories that any front-line worker who quit from that other division was marked not eligible for rehire.
What do you mean by ‘can’t’ and ‘allowed’ exactly? Generally HR policies are set by a combination of ‘what the law says we have to do’, ‘what will keep us from getting sued’, and ‘what fits our corporate culture or image’. Like muldoonthief said, there’s no legal requirement to confidentiality in a case like this, unlike medical records where HIPAA. So why would most companies not want to discuss it? (also, FYI I’m only speaking to US law here, labor laws are really different in other countries).
Officially discussing an incident like that without careful wording and good documentation of claims could open the door to a lawsuit, and even if the suit won’t win it’s costly. (Corporations have to use an actual lawyer to represent them, they can’t just have Joe from HR show up like a small business in small claims court could). Talking about an ex-employee can look an awful lot like tawdry gossip, and can make your existing employees worried about whether their HR dealings will be publicized, so there’s another argument against talking. Most large companies will have a confidentiality policy covering what HR or any senior official says not because they have to but because it’s low risk and low cost to do so.
And what about Charlie? He doesn’t really have the right to tell people about the punch in the face - the company can tell him that he needs to keep the fight confidential too. If they fire him for going to the police or a lawyer they’re almost certainly going to regret it, but they’re well within their rights to fire him if he talks about it at the office or to the press. Most companies don’t have a policy like this because it is hard to enforce and tends to piss people off, but they generally can if they want to.
“Right to work” laws are laws that stipulate that a union cannot set up a ‘closed shop’ - that is, a contract stating ‘everyone who works here must join the union’ or ‘you are only allowed to work here if you join the union’ is either not legal or that clause is non-enforceable. Some states have this, some don’t, and it’s a rather specific piece of legislation that doesn’t have any effect on the vast majority of people.
What you’re thinking of is ‘at-will employment’, which is either explicit law or judicial doctrine in every state but Montana. People get the two mixed up a lot, but they’re really very distinct concepts.
There are people who are fired but eligible for re-hire, and companies that will mark anyone who quits ‘not eligible for re-hire’, so unless you know that company’s HR policies it’s not that cut and dried.
Thanks - good point, I’d forgotten th distinction.
I would think that any person who told someone there were consequences for going to the police to report a crime leaves themselves open to charges of obstruction of justice etc.?
FWIW, the largish company I work for explicitly states in the “workplace violence” part of the employee handbook that if you feel that a coworker has assaulted you, you are completely free to involve the police, and the company will absolutely not retaliate against you for that.
The last company I worked for had a policy that if you had left on voluntary redundancy terms you could not normally expect to be rehired again. So, ‘not eligible for re-hire’.
If asked, they supplied the dates between which you were employed. But nothing else.
I doubt that a DA would want to file obstruction of justice charges against a prominent business about a misdemeanor, it just doesn’t seem like a good deal for the DA, and I’ve never heard of it happening for a case like the OP. What will really hit employers is that, while 49/50 states have at-will employment, one of the big exceptions to ‘at-will’ is firing someone for ‘violations of public policy’ which covers things like voting and jury duty. I’m pretty sure that firing you for reporting a crime that happened to you to the police would count as a violation of public policy, which means that you could sue to get your job back, back pay, and penalties, plus some really bad press for the company.
A few years ago there was a case where two drunken BlackBerry execs caused a flight to be diverted.
RIM (at the time) certainly didn’t holdback their decision:
“RIM expects that its employees conduct themselves in a manner reflective of our strong principles and standards of business behaviour,” the company said in a statement from Waterloo, Ont."
“RIM does not condone behaviour that conflicts with applicable laws and employees are expected to act, at all times, with integrity and respect. The individuals involved in this incident are no longer employed by RIM.”
One of the guys was not a Canadian citizen and ended up being deported to Scotland.
Why charge the company? Charge the persons who told (threatened) the employee with consequences… unless the company is dumb enough to put it in the published policy or a memo.
If they just said it verbally, good luck proving that they did in court. If they put it in writing, then it’s in a memo. If they fired the guy, then there is definitely something in writing.
Most of this information is about preventing lawsuits. A company doesn’t want a lawsuit because they have to pay to defend it.
However you can legally share factual information. If the person was late you can share that. You can be sued as anyone can sue anyone, but being late is a very easy thing to back up even without documentation.
In the US, unless you’re protected by a CBA or it’s related to you being part of a protected class you have little hope of winning a lawsuit. These suits are settled often by insurance, but those are settled not won.
Also certain state, notably California have tough privacy laws, most do not.
Companies often fall back on false, “It’s illegal to say this or do this” because it’s easier to avoid situations with that phrase and employees readily accept it, true or not.