They might not believe this, but employers are pretty good at manufacturing non-protected reasons for terminating someone. Sudden writeups for things that otherwise would be overlooked, changes that negatively effect several people (so it’s not “targeted”) like shift changes always include the targeted person, straight up lying about conflicts that never happened or reframing am argument as the fault of an unruly employee…
It can be real hard to prove discrimination without a smoking gun.
I use to be part of an agency that protected certain rights of workers. This would be called a constructive dismissal and is still cause for a wrongful termination. The largest issue is documentation that is hit or miss. Unfortunately, funding issues mean the agencies have to pick and choose what to pursue legally and so they will often choose instead to pursue monetarily larger cases even if the smaller ones are ironclad. Though sometimes they will train newer legal team members on those smaller ones.
But I’ve also dealt with specific instances of a supervisor calling a person with a lisp a slur starting with F and threatening to fire them if they spoke with us.
The documentation is the biggest problem. If I hadn’t consistently heard the same sort of thing from so many people at so many different employers I wouldn’t believe the problem is as ubiquitous as it is. I’ve also seen so many of these things just…stop when the person sends the follow up email confirming what they just spoke about.
They might not believe this, but employers are pretty good at manufacturing non-protected reasons for terminating someone. Sudden writeups for things that otherwise would be overlooked, changes that negatively effect several people (so it’s not “targeted”) like shift changes always include the targeted person, straight up lying about conflicts that never happened or reframing am argument as the fault of an unruly employee…
It can be real hard to prove discrimination without a smoking gun.
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I use to be part of an agency that protected certain rights of workers. This would be called a constructive dismissal and is still cause for a wrongful termination. The largest issue is documentation that is hit or miss. Unfortunately, funding issues mean the agencies have to pick and choose what to pursue legally and so they will often choose instead to pursue monetarily larger cases even if the smaller ones are ironclad. Though sometimes they will train newer legal team members on those smaller ones.
But I’ve also dealt with specific instances of a supervisor calling a person with a lisp a slur starting with F and threatening to fire them if they spoke with us.
The documentation is the biggest problem. If I hadn’t consistently heard the same sort of thing from so many people at so many different employers I wouldn’t believe the problem is as ubiquitous as it is. I’ve also seen so many of these things just…stop when the person sends the follow up email confirming what they just spoke about.