this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Yes, we do have protections in America. The secret is to not work for ultra corporations like Amazon, Tesla, Disney, and so on. Nobody is "supposed to" be able to fire people randomly, but the more "eager" businesses take shortcuts and have the might to surpass elements of society we take for granted. Be a librarian or something.
Actually I'm going to disagree strongly with that statement.
Small business are far, far worse at abusing workers. If a small business fires you, you've got absolutely no recourse. They can lay you off with no severance and then hire someone new a day layer, and who's going to do anything about it? They don't have that many employees so there's no pattern and no class-action, and you can't afford to hire a lawyer to spend years fighting them in court.
In comparison, when you work at a big company, they have rules and an HR department to make sure they're going everything legally. Your boss wants to fire you? First your boss has to give you a negative performance review detailing exactly what you're doing wrong. Then they have to give you an opportunity to correct it. Only then can they fire you. At an absolute minimum, it gives you a chance to start looking for a new job. Often it gives you a chance to transfer within the company, if you were otherwise a well-liked and valuable employee.
If a large company wants to let you go, they're going to give you severance pay and extended benefits.
Of course you hear about the occasional incident where Elon Musk fires someone on the spot or a Disney employee gets reprimanded for something silly. But those incidents are extremely rare, and most of the time they end up settling behind the scenes for a nice severance.
Now, I know, I know. The HR department is there to protect the company, not you. But that's exactly why the HR department ensures employees are treated well, even when they're fired - because they don't want a lawsuit later.
Ok, companies choosing to not be shit isn't a protection. They could change their minds and be shit tomorrow.
Or they get bought by a larger, more shit company, who changes company culture.
Hell, they don't even have to be bought. The original owner could just die and his replacement might just be terrible.
The replacement might be terrible but they're still enforced to treat people with the legal requirement for working standards (and yes there are protection laws, but it's the big businesses that disobey them). You'll be hard pressed to find complaints about working conditions in, say, the Wegmans chain.
You can sue a company if it's small enough to not be controlling. Their treatment of you will be enforced against. A large company, however, will have richer lawyers and thus more power, plus the power to bribe.
What the actual fuck are you talking about? Sue? For what? There are no laws about firing you. I once got laid off for absolutely no reason other than them restructuring and eliminating my position, along with many others to be more profitable. I got a pathetic (at least in my opinion) severance and was out looking for work with zero warning. That's what this guy is asking about.
You can't sue for being laid off/or fired. You can collect unemployment. You can sue for harassment, or being fired for retaliation or some specific other things. It's going to be a uphill battle every time even in those instances though.
If it's for discriminatory reasons, yes, you can.
Yes, that would fall into the "specific other things" I mentioned. A very small amount of the time you can sue for being fired for super fucked up reasons. Companies can just fire you for no reason whenever they want.
I was trying to imply it's high risk to do that. Suppose you have someone of a racial minority and for the first few days there is ambiguity over whether the new employee is welcome. Then on day eight, they do something, get fired, don't understand what just happened, then there can be someone to look into if it was covert discrimination. Then something like finding out all the people who were fired randomly just happened to be of one or more certain minorities, and poof, a legally enforced shadow of suspicion has been cast. GoodWill comes to mind here.
Imo big corporations are way more likely to follow the law than some small business tyrant
Disney is heavily unionized, they're one of the better companies on that list to work for. From entertainment unions such as writers and actors guilds to their theme park workers being unionized, they can't just walk over their workers like most US companies because they will fight back