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> Also, a brief refresher: lying about someone is defamation. If you defame people's performance and cause them to lose money you are personally liable for dama
by mjr00 4y ago
> Also, a brief refresher: lying about someone is defamation. If you defame people's performance and cause them to lose money you are personally liable for damages.
Genuinely curious: do you have an example of a manager who was personally held financially liable after firing an employee? I couldn't find an example in some brief Googling, but IANAL and I'm curious if this is even a possibility.
Even if it is possible, though, it seems... pretty stupid, frankly: you'd get a much higher payout from suing the company rather than the manager directly, and the manager could use corporate policy as a shield. Plus, in most organizations, HR is the one who pulls the trigger, not the manager; so who really fires you? HR could have always vetoed after all, or anyone else further up the management chain. Seems like it'd be very tough to prove that a single direct manager was unilaterally responsible for damages.
Anyway, this is why most medium-and-larger organizations now have documented processes with PIPs and such. As long as there's a paper trail, you as an employee don't have much of a chance of winning a lawsuit, even if you feel like you were fired due to your manager being an asshole.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoThere are limits to the freedom of expression (i.e.: what you can communicate verbally or in writing no matter what the context). Fraud, defamation (libel, slander), perjury, etc. No matter what your position is, you are not free from the consequences of those.
- mjr00 4y agoThis doesn't answer my question, and I didn't say anything about "freedom of expression" because it doesn't apply here. Again, do you have a documented instance of an individual manager, preferably at a company larger than ~100 people, getting personally sued after a dismissal of one of their direct reports?
- 29athrowaway 4y agoClaims of defamation are often part of discrimination and wrongful termination suits. Nowadays there are forced arbitration clauses that prevent you from suing your employer in a regular court. Instead, you have to go to a private kangaroo court where they make their own rules, often not published in advance and that can change at any time for any reason.
- johndhi 4y agoI am a lawyer. I guess it's technically true you (or more likely your company) can get sued if a manager lies about his reports' performance to their detriment (usually we'd call this discrimination) but the general notion that it is or should be more common is stupid.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoIf it happens more, there should be more litigation activity as as consequence.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago> As long as there's a paper trail, you as an employee don't have much of a chance of winning a lawsuit, even if you feel like you were fired due to your manager being an asshole. Yeah, if you want to win a wrongful dismissal lawsuit you're gonna have to have a hell of a paper trail yourself, or some smoking gun evidence of other wrongdoing like drunken voice mail recordings or something. And even then, realistically, this sort of things settles out of court more often than not.