That’s basically the question. It seems like peons get fired but executives are asked to resign. Is requesting a resignation just a polite way of saying “You’re Fired!”, or is there another reason behind it?
Professional courtesy. At that level, positions have as much to do with politics as job performance, and so it’s just polite to give someone the opportunity to not have been fired as long as they weren’t sucking it up.
Some of us low-level workers will be asked to resign occasionally. Even in an at-will employment state (like Virginia, for instance), juries tend not to be sympathetic to large corporations in wrongful termination lawsuits and so it’s often less risky to get an employee to resign than to fire them. Mind you, I’m not a lawyer or an employment specialist or anything like that, but I have been involved in trying to get rid of an undesirable sort, and this what my manager at the time told me.
Ah, professional courtesy. I should have guessed.
So the moral of the story here is: if you think you’re getting terminated wrongfully, never resign willfully. 
I thought it had to do with Unemployment benefits. If you get fired you are entitled but if you quit you aren’t. I’m probably wrong though.
If you are firing someone for cause, why would you feel an obligation to be polite?
Bingo! Ding! Ding! Ding!
Unless you quit for very special reasons like you have a documented medical condition made worse by the employment, you are not eligible for UI. At least not in NJ.
Another tactic is to keep making you so miserable that you quit. When this can’t be done you are assigned to “special projects.”
The employer may have an ulterior motive in “allowing” the employee to resign.
An employee who is fired can typically apply for unemployment benefits (unless fired for misconduct). On the other hand, if the employee resigns, he or she may not qualify for unemployment benefits. Here’s the Georgia statute on the subject.
Unemployment claims cost employers money, as they increase the amount the employer is required to contribute to state unemployment funds. Thus, it is to the employer’s benefit to accept an employee’s resignation rather than terminate the employee.
You might not be firing them “for cause.” Sometimes in the corporate environment you want someone gone not because they’ve done something awful, like stealing, but just because you want someone else. If the person is in a high enough position, you might want something from them some day.
If you ARE firing them for specified wrongdoing, that’s a special case.
“Asked to resign”, is, as has been pointed out, a way to dodge having to pay unemployment benefits. However, if you’re firing someone for just cause, and you’ve got your documentation ducks in a row, then fire away. In my experience, people get asked to resign when the employer plans to fire someone but there’s some wiggle room in the paperwork that the employee can use to collect.
Someone caught stealing from the cash register isn’t going to be asked to resign, they’ll be fired.
“Given the opportunity” to resign is different. It may not sound a lot different, but in cases where there isn’t necessarily a lot of animosity - more for situations like the ones ultrafilter mentions. That department head with a great work record that got caught skinny dipping with the boss’s 18 year old daughter? He knows he’s screwed the pooch and has no future, there’s no legal cause to fire him, and he’s going to fight the firing if you try it, but everyone agrees he has to go? He’ll be given a little heart to heart and given the opportunity to resign.
IANAL, this is merely IMHO, Mr Bus Guy - Who has never in his life swam with the boss’s kid.
The implication being, if you don’t agree, the employer will make your life at the company hell? Is there any reason to agree to resign? Looks better on the resume maybe?
Some people want to be able to say I’ve never been fired so letting them resign is an out.
Not particularly. Usually, at this point, they’ve decided you’re fired anyway and use this with gullible employees that think it will look worse for them if they get fired than if they quit.
It costs a lot of time and money to fight even the unemployment claims you win. I’m religious about not firing anyone until I KNOW I have it right. And I’ve got union employees. In my current job, I’ve had to fire 3 people in the last 2 years and in each case, the union represented them throughout the disciplinary process and I don’t have a single grievance on those cases, not have I had an appeal to unemployment, so I never have had to resort to the “I’ll give you a chance to quit before I fire you” routine.
But in previous jobs, yeah I’ve done it. There are people that will believe it’s always better to resign than to be fired. Heck, I’ve had people ASK if they could resign instead of be fired.
Yes sir, sign right here…
Actually, it stems mostly from urban folklore about the distinction.
Many employers believe that an employee who resigns can’t sue for wrongful discharge and can’t claim unemployment benefits. This is a mistake.
Most jurisdictions permit a discharged employee to prove constructive discharge in both contexts. Again, most jurisdictions recognize, “quit or be fired” as grounds to quit. So typically, the “but he resigned” defense does not go very far. Instead, it boils down to the same issues either way.
In the wrongful discharge context, the employee still has to prove either:
1.That there was a contract to terminate only for cause, and no cause existed; or
2. That the termination was for an illegal reason.
in the unemployment context the issue is usually whether the employer terminated the employee for good cause.
Few courts are fooled by grudging resignations.
OTOH, if an employer wants to be rid of an employee with some insurance against future claims, the employer can pay an employee and get a release and a voluntary resignation. This is pretty common when an executive is asked to leave.
http://bostonworks.boston.com/globe/job_doc/archives/081003.shtml
Of course, most employees assume that they don’t have rights if they resign. So to some extent, there is a payoff to a forced resignation.
An employee I know about from long ago and far away was given the resign/fired choice after a MAJOR screw-up. He elected resignation, not to affect unemployment benefits, but pension and health benefits accrued over many years. Apparently large portions would be forfeit if he were fired.
So it would depend on how the laws of your state or country, and the regulations of your job, were written concerning benefits you obtain after you leave the job. Unemployment may be only one of many benefits to consider. There could be longer term ones.
The usual distinction in cases like that is between termination for cause and layoff or resignation.
E.g., http://www.boeing.com/companyoffices/empinfo/benefits/work_events_files/A83830.pdf (pdf)
http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/pensions/fact14.htm
Especially when there is a union involved, a layoff (termination without cause) can be more complicated or impossible. Sometimes an employee who has pension rights but stands to lose them if terminated can be convinced to resign that way. The benefit, as gabriela has indicated, is that the employee can retain pension rights. If the employee refused to resign, the employer would have to terminate for cause, cause which could later be challenged in an arbitration. So the employer benefits by avoiding the arbitration, and the employee benefits by keeping pension rights.
I just went through this last year. I was the COO of a company and had a 6-month probationary period. Before that period ended, my boss walked in out of the blue one day and told me she was taking back operational control. I was stunned, because it came without warning. I sat there for a couple of weeks with nothing to do, and finally the HR guy got the cajones to ask me to resign. I did, grudgingly.
After talking to an unemployment rep, she determined that I was basically forced to resign because the company had taken away all of my responsibilities. It was a de facto firing without cause, but since it was in the probationary period, I had little legal recourse. So I collected unemployment benefits.
There was no “professional courtesy” here at all. They were trying to save money by eliminating my position, and had no cause to fire me. So instead of being honest about it and risk being sued, they took the cowardly way out, hoping they would get the added benefit of not having to foot the bill for unemployment wages.
I went to a lawyer and while she thought I might have a weak case for promissory estoppel, she thought I would be wasting my money.
And yes, I’m still bitter about it.
I know a fellow who went through this recently (not myself, but someone whom I don’t feel comfortable identifying). He was an IT guy for a small-but-growing company, and as near as I can tell, he was doing a great job. But the boss wanted to move the IT department to another state and knew he wouldn’t be willing to move. So, on the advice of an attorney, she had the fellow’s supervisor take him out to lunch and say (paraphrased, of course), “You’re never going back to the office. We’ll pack your things up and send them to you. You can sign this letter of resignation, in which case you’ll get a decent severance package; or you can refuse to sign, in which case you’ll get zip. You gotta sign immediately if you want it: leave this meeting without signing, and no severance package.”
He was absolutely blindsided by this–he didn’t even know that the IT department would be moving, and he’d been on pretty good terms with the business owner previously. So he signed.
Afterward, he regretted signing, and he talked to an employment law specialist (I forget whether it was a nonprofit or a government specialist), who told him that he would be eligible for unemployment benefits if he wanted to fight for them. What she also said was that, if he could get a letter of recommendation from the business owner, it’d really help his case.
He talked to the business owner and kinda chewed her out for the crappy way in which he’d been fired, and she was very contrite and promised him a letter of recommendation. However, because he’s frankly a great IT guy and because he’d been able to schmooze with other folks, he started getting tons of contract work before the severance package ran out, and moved straight from that into a state job. So he never pursued it.
I also was tangentially involved in a case at a humane society. A woman announced that she was going to be taking sick days over the weekend to go camping, due to how stressed she’d become at the work environment (she and the boss hated each other, and she’d been volunteering to perform euthanasia a lot). The boss told her that wasn’t an option; she said she didn’t care; when she didn’t show up for her assigned shifts, the boss considered her to have resigned. She applied for unemployment and won. (Weirdly, she also applied for disability benefits and won–between the two, I believe she may have ended up earning more for not working than she had for working).
Her appeal for unemployment contained at least a couple of signficantly false statements; I was brought in, as a new employee, at her hearing, where I explained how several of her claims were statistically impossible. She yelled at me and tried to argue that because I’d never performed euthanasia, my input was irrelevant. It was not fun.
The moral? Sometimes people don’t get unemployment even though they should, and sometimes people do get it even though they shouldn’t.
Daniel