Читать книгу Employment Law Update - Jonathan Ingber - Страница 15

An employee should have the right to have the employer consistently follow investigative, disciplinary, and termination procedures that are set forth in the employer's policies or in applicable law.

When an applicant's or employee's statutory or public policy rights are violated, an applicant or employee may be able to sue for hiring, reinstatement, promotion, back pay, forward pay, and reasonable accommodation. Compensatory damages may be recoverable for actual monetary losses, future money losses, mental anguish, and inconvenience. Where an intentional act is alleged and an employer acted with malice or reckless indifference, the applicant or employee also may be entitled to an award of punitive damages.⁷ The term “punitive” is derived from “punish,” which is the objective when a wrongdoer engages in willful or deliberate behavior that injures another person.

In general, an at-will employee may be fired with cause, without cause, or for no reason at all — as long as public policy rights or other legal rights of the employee are not violated. This holds true even in California, where the California Supreme Court held in 2006 in Dore v. Arnold Worldwide⁸ that an employer who provided the employee notice of an at-will relationship at the time the employee was hired — in specific, clear, and unambiguous language — could terminate an at-will employee at any time, with or without cause.

Note: California is singled out here because its courts are generally believed to be more favorably disposed to employee rights than the courts of many other states. For this reason, California state court employment litigation often can signal potential future employment law developments in other states.