Asklemmy

43940 readers

615 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

270

Does the US have zero employee protection laws?? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by luthis to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

156 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Just following on from this: https://lemmy.nz/post/1134134

Ex-Tesla employee reveals shocking details on worker conditions: 'You get fired on the spot.'

I'm curious about how far this goes.

You can't get fired on the spot in NZ, unless you like, shot someone or set the building on fire or something really bad.

But it seems that in the US, there's little to no protections for employees when their bosses are dickheads?

Also, any personal stories of getting fired on the spot?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Astroturfed@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If it's for discriminatory reasons, yes, you can.

[–] Astroturfed@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago

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.