Legal Question in Employment Law in California
Deceptive termination
My husband has worked for a large computer company for nearly 8 years. When he was hired as a manager, he was told to run the dept. as he saw fit, with no complaints from his boss at the time. Well, that mgr. left and a new mgr was appointed. This new mgr. began to tell my husband he wanted the dept. run HIS way and has butt heads with my husband for the past 2 years. This past March, during performance review, he placed my husband on 90 day probation and at the end of that period he would be re-evaluated. About a week or 2 later, as my husband was looking on a few internet job sites he found his job posted. H confronted his mgr about this and his reply was ''oh, I was meaning to tell you, but you're being let go anyway in 90 days''. He said he wasn't going to give my husband 90 days to improve; he was just going to fire him anyway, improvement or no improvement.
I am mad and that is why I am contacting you. Is there anything that can be done given what has transpired with my husband's employment? Can he be terminated like that? What should we do? Does he have any rights as an employee?
1 Answer from Attorneys
Re: Deceptive termination
Unfortunately, this happens way too often. A hatchet-person is brought in to clean house. The new supervisor's ego can be huge and he doesn't want competition from those who know more than he does.
How old is your husband? Does he sense that there's age discrimination? Any other kind of discrimination? CA employees usually are presumed to be at-will, which means they can be fired at any time for any or no reason, except an illegal reason such as discrimination, whistleblowing, etc. There sometimes is an implied contract that a person only can be fired for good cause, but that depends on various factors which you haven't described.
In hindsight many months from now, your husband will be happy he's out of there -- when he's working at a better paying job.
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