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Ten things your boss must do to fire you
Jacked from another site, but thought it would be useful here.
10 Steps of Walking the Plank Toward Termination: Step 4 Your Boss Switches from Harassing You in Person to
10 Steps of Walking the Plank Toward Termination: STEP 4 Your Boss Switches From Harassing You In-Person to Harassing You In Writing
October 23, 2008 ·
When your boss goes to Human Resources and asks “Can I fire this employee right now?”, do you know what the H.R. Rep always answers? H.R. says, “What documentation do you have that shows your employee is not doing their job?”
You know what happens next? Your boss looks down at his or her own feet, and their face starts turning red. Then they look back up at the H.R. Person and say something like “Goddamnit, don’t we have at-will employment in this state?! It used to be if someone didn’t do their job they got fired! Plain and simple. How come all you ever say is ‘no’? Why don’t you ever help us get things done around here, instead of just putting up road blocks all the time?!”
The H.R. Rep responds to this tirade with something like, “I take it you have done no documentation of this employee’s performance? You know, like I taught all the managers to do in that little half day seminar last month?”
“I prefer verbal feedback and coaching. The more informal type,” your boss says. He’s referring to the last time he yelled at you.
“Well,” says the H.R. Rep, “did you document in your performance log the date and time of each of these verbal feedback and coaching sessions you had with your employee?” The H.R. Rep says this with a slight grin, because they know what the answer is.
This is where your boss blurts out something like “F*ck! I’ll get your f*cking documentation,” and then stomps back to your department to start writing an email to you about your performance. And the H.R. Rep? This is when they cooly open a notebook and jot down the date and time your boss swore at them and admitted to not doing proper documentation.
Then the H.R. Rep calls a friend who is a H.R. Rep at another company. They meet at a nearby Starbucks and sip lattes and complain about how everybody at their company hates H.R people.
Really, this is not an exaggeration. Not at all. This what happens between managers and H.R. Rep’s every single day, especially know that managers are under pressure to start cutting payrolls and reduce labor costs.
Watch for meetings between your boss and someone from H.R. If you can see into the office, does your boss appear agitated? Does the boss leave the meeting and immediately start writing? And most important, does your boss send you a terse, or even angry letter about your performance soon after your boss met with H.R.?
These are all signs that your boss wants to let you go, and is trying to get it approved by H.R. first.
If you are not in a position to observe what meetings your boss has, and with whom, never fear. There are other ways to tell.
* Does your boss send you emails, particularly about some aspect of you doing your job, with increased frequency?
* Does your boss send you a written memo about a deadline you missed (probably for good reason) instead of chatting with you and letting you explain?
* Does your boss ask you to sign or initial any memo that has anything to do with your performance, or any project you’ve been working on?
The correlation to increased communication with your boss in writing is that your boss communicates with you face to face less and less. Or, if he or she does talk to you in person, they immediately send you a “confirming” letter or email that summarizes their version of the conversation you just had.
Now you know what happens between H.R. and your supervisor in those closed door meetings. You know what to watch for… a sharp increase in written communication from your boss… so you can identify step number 4 of the ten steps of walking the plank toward termination.
Have you seen this occur to yourself or a co-worker at your workplace? Have you ever been privy to what HR and your boss were talking about? Let us know in the comments section to this post!
If any of the above is happening make sure to document things as well, especially if you know you're in the right.
Seriously, I know alot of people who work in administration and are being bullied like this.
If someone is constantly being wrote up on false accusations, at what point does it become grounds to sue for emotional distress at least?
Can a lawyer help me with this b/c I know these peeps have to have a case after all of the years enduring the b.s.
Here's another article from that same site. It describes the best way to go about suing abusive managers is to use the Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress defense. Sometimes you may have to sue the person individually, along with the company to get some relief. The key thing is to document EVERYTHING and see a doctor detailing how sick your feeling from abuse your taking at work.
The Abusive Boss Who Got Sued For “Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress”
June 16, 2009
El Jefe AbusivoHave you felt emotional distress at work because of the abusive way your boss treats you? Many of the people who contact me for help in dealing with a bully boss feel this way, and they want to sue their boss in court for all the workplace abuse he or she has inflicted.
When someone like this tells me they want to sue, the first thing they say is that their boss caused “a hostile work environment.” (If you still think you can sue for a hostile work environment, you need to sign up for my 7 Free Work Law Secrets Email Course). The second thing people want to sue for is “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” This also rarely works, and I don’t advise pursuing it, but…
…but a women named Gina Strong in Washington State recently has some success suing her boss for negligent infliction of emotional distress. Because she also sued her boss for intentional infliction of emotional distress (and lost on that one), her story is a great example of what legal claims can work if you want to sue your boss and which legal claims don’t (usually) work. Having a boss who did more than just call her names is where Gina’s story starts.
Gina Strong’s Emotional Distress
Gina Strong worked in a school district print shop, where Jim Terrell supervised her. Terrell screamed at Gina every day. Terrell criticized her work in a sarcastic unprofessional manner. Terrell told blond jokes in Gina’s presence, and yes Gina was blond. Terrell even ridiculed Gina’s personal life: he made fun of her new house; he mocked her husband’s job; and he told her that her son would soon realize that she was a “bum” mother.
How did Gina respond to Terrell’s workplace harassment? She responded the in the same way as many of the people who are reading this article have have responded to their own abusive work environments: she vomited, she experienced anxiety attacks, she suffer from depression, and she even began to have a heart arrhythmia.
Gina went to the school district office and filed a harassment complaint against Terrell. A district office employee, Nichollet Koch “investigated” the allegations and found (like every other in-house investigation) that nothing Terrell did to Gina “rose to the level of illegal harassment.” In other words, the organization knew that Terrell was an abusive asshole, but it wasn’t illegal abuse. So, the school district didn’t punish Terrell. It “recommended” that Terrell take some classes to improve his “management style.” Gina was not satisfied.
After the district closed it’s file on the matter, something made the investigator, Koch, look further into Terrell’s behavior. Soon after the district office recommended that Terrell be terminated. Terrell resigned before that happened.
Three months after Terrell had resigned Gina filed a lawsuit against the district officer and Terrell as individuals (not as agents of the school district). Both defendants filed motions for summary judgment – which asks the judge to throw the case out before trial. The court did throw out the case, but Gina was not satisfied. She filed an appeal.
The Appeals Court considered whether Gina could sue her boss for Constitutional violations (the court said no), whether she could sue her boss for “intentional infliction of emotional distress” (the court said no again) and whether she could sue her boss for “negligent infliction of emotional distress” (the court said yes).
The Appeals Court noted that Gina did not allege that Terrell sexually harassed her, or that his conduct created a “hostile work environment based on sex”. Instead the court observed that “the majority of her claims related to Terrell’s method and style of supervision.”
Court Acts on Gina’s “Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress Claim”
The legal claim of “intentional infliction of emotional distress” is a “tort” (which is not a dessert in this context). A “tort” is a civil wrong – as opposed to a criminal wrong. Torts come from the history of judges writing written decisions about why the judge decided in favor of one side and against the other side.
In the state of Washington, for you to prevail against your boss on the tort claim of “intentional infliction of emotional distress” (IIED for short) you must prove that:
1.
Your boss engaged in extreme and outrageous conduct;
2.
Your boss intentionally or recklessly inflicted emotional distress on you; and
3.
Your boss’s outrageous conduct actually caused you to feel severe emotional distress.
The Washington State Supreme Court adopted these elements from a publication called the Restatement (Second) of Torts sec. 46 (1965). I’ll explain the Restatement more fully in another article, but for our immediate purposes all you need to know is that most states follow the Restatement; so most States, including your state, use the same three elements above for their tort of IIED.
Most people read the elements of IIED and think “Perfect! This is how I’m going to sue my boss!!” The elements seem to fit what their boss does to them. It just sounds right. Their boss purposefully puts them through hell, and they can’t sleep, feel depressed, suffer from anxiety, and begin getting ulcers.
The problem is, most of what your boss does to put you “through hell” does not meet the very high threshold of what it takes to qualify as “outrageous.” In Gina’s appeal the court decided that the first element of IIED, outrageous behavior, must be “so outrageous in character and extreme in degree, as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency, and to be regarded as atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized community.”
IIED, said the court “does not extend to mere insults, indignities, threats, annoyances, petty oppressions, or other trivialities.” The court claimed to be sympathetic to Gina’s plight, but said that what her boss did was more in the vein of “insults” and “indignities” and did not cross the boundary into something “beyond all possible bounds of decency” and “atrocious”.
Victory! The Court Allows Gina’s Claim of Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress
After dismissing her IIED claim, the court turned to Gina’s legal claim against Terrell for the tort of Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress (NIED). This time, the Appeals Court decided that what Terrell did could possibly rise to the level of NIED, and therefore allowed Gina to take Terrell to trial on the NIED claim.
NIED is more often recognized in the workplace setting when “it does not result from an employer’s disciplinary acts or its response to a workplace personality dispute.” The elements of this claim are:
1.
Boss had a duty to refrain from conduct that would foreseeably harm you;
2.
Boss breached the duty of #1, and did engage in conduct that would cause you forseeable harm;
3.
The boss’s conduct in #2 directly caused you harm
4.
You actually were harmed (you are not exceptionally tough, and didn’t manage to shrug it off);
5.
You have objective medical evidence that you experienced emotional distress (such as your doctor had to prescribe anti-depressants, sleeping pills, or high blood pressure medication).
In Gina’s case against Terrell, she claimed that he did the following things (#2) and had a duty not to (#1) which directly caused (#3) her actual harm (#4), and she also had seen a doctor who could verify her “emotional distress” harm. So, here are the acts that made up element #2, what the boss Terrell should NOT have done:
*
He continuously made demeaning comments and jokes about her blond hair until she dyed it brown
*
He mocked the house she purchased
*
He mocked her husband’s job
*
He called her a “bum mother”
*
He spit in her face as he screamed at her for using the wrong bulletin board for union information
*
He stood so close to her while screaming in her face that she feared he would strike her and felt his spit hitting her face
*
He disconnected the telephone during the night shift so she could not call out of the print shop
Terrell tried to argue that these actions could not possibly amount to NIED, because they were all “workplace personality disputes” or were related to discipline in the workplace. The court didn’t buy that argument for a second.
The court pointed out that spitting in someone’s face can equal fourth degree assault. Making someone believe you are going to hit them can equal battery. Neither of these two things are a “mere workplace personality dispute.”
The court also pointed out that there was no way the boss, Terrell, could convince them that his comments were all work related. Terrell’s mocking of Gina’s personal life and taunts about her hair color were “rude, boorish, and mean-spirited and were not done in furtherance of legitimate work-related topics… Terrell’s conduct regarding [Gina’s] personal life was not a workplace dispute, although it occurred in the workplace.”
The court then reversed the lower court, and ordered that Gina be allowed to go to trial in front of a jury on the NIED claim.
Undercover Lawyer’s Take Away Tips:
1.
Don’t believe that you can sue a jackass boss for acting like a jackass by using “intentional infliction of emotional distress;” your best bet is, and always will be, to get yourself in a protected class.
2.
You might be able to sue your boss for negligent infliction of emotional distress, but only if your state recognizes this tort and your boss is attacking you as a person and not as an employee.
3.
Keep a journal, take notes, write everything down. It bears repeating that you need to keep dated quotes of what your boss says and does. To pursue an negligent infliction claim you will need to show that he or she lashed out at you in ways that are completely unrelated to workplace issues.
Undercoverlawyer.com is very informative and they have forums on how to deal with workplace abuse and sneaky firings by management. Many companies want to fire people without paying unemployment, so it's especially important to make sure you document and keep everything sent or said to you about why you're being fired.
It has been proven that the employer will tell the fired employee one thing, but unemployment another. Look for yourselves folks.
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