Comment by sascovid19tw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sascovid19tw | Hacker News Reader

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I have firsthand experience with this, albeit not at Intel. Several known positive cases have appeared Samsung's fab in Austin. Samsung mandates they not return and quarantine at home.

Before any of that, I'd already decided back in early March—when it became clear that things were more serious than people had been taking everything—that I'd stick around until we either temporarily shut down or when the reported cases start getting too close for comfort.

A few weeks ago I sat down in the morning to find another company-wide email sent out at 9:00PM the night before (don't know why they hadn't also forwarded a copy of this one to my personal inbox that I could access from home, as with the ones before). In this case, symptoms were reported 4 days before, and now with confirmation having tested positive. This time it was on my floor, not far from where I sit in our open office. I sent an email that I was leaving and would not be returning for at least two weeks and pending further info about any spread. That was a Friday. I got fired over email (although not in those terms) at the end of the day the following Monday:

Although you did not resign failure to report to your scheduled shift(s) has been taken as a voluntary resignation. We have gone ahead and ended your assignment for you. Please do not report back to the SAS site as your assingment here is done.

This was all within the last two weeks. At the time, our group had been doing a piss poor job of observing both company and local rules about distancing. It had been less than a week since people around me had finally gotten moved to different workstations. It wasn't an availability problem, because (a) half the office was already a ghost town due to select folks ordered to work from home, and (b) the rest of the company had been been working spread out for something like a month already—but not our group.

At the beginning of April, we were supposed to get a scheduled payout for earned PTO, but we received an email that due to COVID they were actually going to delay the payout. I had to jump through a lot of hoops alternately taking on extra days that I wasn't ordinarily scheduled and taking off other days to burn the PTO to give the effect of getting the payout for the hours I'd accrued.

The issue here is you could probably have not lost your job if you had made this a request to HR or your manager instead of a blanket email.

There is a big difference between unilaterally announcing that you won't be coming to work and having your request refused and getting fired for leaving anyway.

This seems correct.

It looks like the employer interpreted the message as a type of ultimatum. In the face of such an ultimatum, they basically have no choice but to treat it as a resignation.

The ultimatum is a very dangerous negotiating tactic, and generally harmful to long-term relationships. As an example, I recommend against posing an ultimatum to a spouse or partner.

No, they also have the choice to implement proper safety measures. You sound as if you believe the employer is entitled to abuse every bit of power they have over an employee.

Edit: speaking of "ultimatums," what do you call a strike? Is it only an "ultimatum" (thus unacceptable) when one person does it, but not when a large group does it?

The problem is not the legitimacy of the issue; the problem is the approach. Grandparent comment said: "I sent an email that I was leaving and would not be returning for at least two weeks and pending further info about any spread."

If they had said that they have concerns about safety, and requested an urgent (possibly remote) discussion, the employer would have more options. By telling the employer that they were leaving immediately, and not coming back until they felt something had changed, they force an immediate decision of either treating it as a resignation, or accepting and condoning unilateral actions by employees.

Strikes are definitely ultimatums, though they generally have clearer objectives, and are usually preceded by a series of discussions. Strikes are not conducive to good relationships.

I think you missed the part where the employee was notified of a coronavirus case on their floor by an email they could only read at work.

Read this again, and comprehend that the HR unilaterally and knowingly subjected them to risk of contacting the virus.

Subsequent self-quarantine at home benefits the company as it reduces the chances of spread. It was the right thing to do, and there's not much to negotiate here given the initial screw-up.

You are looking at this issue from a moral/ethical lens, while I am looking at it from a game theory perspective.

I am not making a judgement as to who is at fault for the situation. I am only stating that the decisive move was the grandparent's e-mail, which left the employer only one rational option (that I know of).

You seem to be making an argument for unionization in the tech industry, then.

The rational option is to grant the employee a (possibly unpaid) leave in such circumstances.

What does Samsung stand to gain from this? They lost an employee (which will cost them in recruiting when they open up again) and gained bad reputation (and a disgruntled former employee).

This is power play that hurts everyone.

> Strikes are definitely ultimatums, though they generally have clearer objectives, and are usually preceded by a series of discussions. Strikes are not conducive to good relationships.

You do know that frequently the only reason these "discussions" are able to be had is because of the threat of a strike? What if the GP had these "discussions" and was told to go back to their desk and STFU? Then what?

Strikes are actually the result of employers abusing employees, which is what creates the bad relationships. You sound as though you believe the other way around, that strikes create bad relationships.

This comes off as pretty heavy victim-blaming bootlicking.

Do you see an alternative way the corporation could have handled this that would at least given the impression they valued the lives of their labor force?

In this specific situation, I think the grandparent left their employer with no options after the "email that I was leaving and would not be returning for at least two weeks and pending further info about any spread". Putting this in an e-mail really forces the employer's hand. Remember that the manager does not know who is being BCCed on the conversation, and must assume the worst (that everyone the employee knows is on a BCC list). Given that state of affairs, I think any competent HR department would insist on treating the e-mail as a resignation.

Imagine someone gets up at their desk, and yells out: "I am leaving, and not coming back until you agree to my terms". That is the (assumed) situation here, and leaves management with almost no options.

If there was an active shooter in the building and the email was “yo, I’m leaving for the rest of day and not coming back until I have more info on the active shooter situation” does the corporation have any option other than to immediately terminate that employee?

In that situation, the employee is saying they will do something that the employer likely wants them to do, or is at most indifferent to. It would be more similar to someone sending an e-mail to their boss saying 'I am coming in to work on Monday, and planning to work very hard, because I fully support the management'.

Yes, they have the option of providing more info on the active shooter situation.

Doesn't sound like he gave an ultimatum... he said he wasn't going to come into the office for two weeks, he didn't say UNLESS the company did something... there was no demand, and a demand is required for an ultimatum.

The definition of an ultimatum is: 'a final demand or statement of terms, the rejection of which will result in retaliation or a breakdown in relations.'

I read "sent an email that I was leaving and would not be returning for at least two weeks and pending further info about any spread" as such an ultimatum. It is a final statement, the rejection of which will result in a breakdown of relations.

>The issue here is you could probably have...

No.

The issue here is that Samsung notified an employee of a coronavirus case on their floor by an email they could only read at work.

The HR willingly and knowingly subjected the employee to the risk of contracting coronavirus, taking away their ability to make an informed decision of whether or not to come to work that day given the risk.

This is criminal behavior. Don't make excuses for them.

You are legally correct but morally quite wrong, any employer is obliged to provide a safe workplace, not taking this serious leaving the employee no other option but to announce they were going home was the first fault.

I'm not even sure if you pushed this hard enough as a wrongful termination that it wouldn't stick.

Were you a contractor? If not, sounds like you have cause for unlawful termination. Bring it to them.

Texas is an at-will employer state. You can be fired for pretty much any reason, or more precisely, without any reason.

The 'pretty much' part is very important, though... you can fire people for no reason, but you can't fire people for protected reasons... I am not sure if firing someone for following legal social distancing orders are protected or not.

Why is that unlawful termination?

Unsafe work environment, may put the employer into OSHA compliance failures territory. Also there may be some local COVID-19 laws in place offering additional protections/mandates for employers to follow.

That said it may be difficult to prove. Employee should demand answers to their concerns about work place safety, and the employer should answer them properly. This doesn't look like it was done. The employer knee-jerkingly firing the employee the next business day after being informed the employee was not abandoning their post for no reason also doesn't look good. They knew why he was not there, and I wonder if they made any attempt to reassure or reiterate their COVID-19 safety plan, and what the expectations of staff are. If the employee was not satisfied with the answer or application of the answer, then they should file a complaint with local employment board and OSHA, and possibly speak with a lawyer if they feel they are under threat of retaliation for reporting genuine work place safety concerns.

Generally, if you email your boss and just say I'm not coming in for two weeks without discussing it with anyone before hand, you are probably going to get fired. But if what this person says is true, and they are working in cramped conditions with people who are testing positive for Covid, then something is definitely out of whack with Samsung and needs to be dealt with.

Not only that, but Samsung also informed them of covid cases on their floor via an email they could only read at work.

"By the way, your office is infected, and we didn't want to tell you this before you arrived here. Sorry not sorry."

This is criminal, and should not be excused.

Sure you can get fire, but they are framing is as voluntary resignation, meaning they are going to deny unemployment claims, which is really fucked.

Many employment agreements have a clause that says that if you fail to report to work for X days without an approved leave you're considered to have voluntarily resigned. Based on the language, I assume that's what happened here.

There is a push by senate Rebublicans to include liability protections for employers. Assuming it gets passed, then depending how it is worded, there may be no case against employers in this type of circumstance regardless of arguements over other worker protection laws.

In any first world country, it would be. In the USA...meh.

In Texas you don't need reasons to fire someone.

Just because you can fire someone for no reason doesn't mean you can fire someone for any reason.

Or to put it another way: just because you can fire someone by rolling dice doesn't mean you can fire someone for being black.

Nothing stopping you from firing someone for being black, then claiming you rolled a dice, however.

IANAL but I believe juries tend to be biased towards the plaintiff (terminated employee) in wrongful termination suits simply because there are far more low level employees in the jury pool than there are managers, not to mention how expensive it can be to litigate. Hence all the CYA measures like performance improvement plans and so on.

You can claim that you rolled dice, but that won't be sufficient - the distrimination law explicitly puts the burden of proof on the employer to demonstrate that the firing was because of a non-discriminatory reason, so if it's just the employer asserting that it was because of dice and the employee asserting that it was because of race, then the employer automatically loses unless they have convincing evidence to state their case.

That's part of why you'd often see lots of HR bureaucracy regarding firing process, documenting infractions, performance improvement plans, etc also in states where technically you can be fired without a reason.

Attorney here who has handled a number of similar wrongful termination claims here. You can try this, but you better have a lot of good, clear documentation backing up your non-discriminatory reason for the firing which, if you're just making it up as a pretense, you probably don't. And if it's found that you did fire for a discriminatory reason and you attempted to lie about that fact, you're opening yourself to a world of hurt.

If they make the job impossible or dangerous, it might at least count as "constructive termination", so they'd be eligible for unemployment.

True but the list of reasons that allow you to fire someone without paying unemployment is limited.

They're trying to avoid paying out unemployment by saying he failed to show up for a shift but even sans-COVID firing after one absence is abnormal.

Why would firing make someone ineligible for unemployment? That seems silly

Quitting your job makes you ineligible for unemployment -- that's why the company called it their "resignation"

Why does it matter to the company if you claim unemployment benefits?

Unemployment taxes for a company scale based on historical claims from that company. More Unemployment Benefits paid out = more future UI taxes paid by that employer. It's meant to be a self-funding system.

To expand on what phonon said -- UI tax rate is company specific and depends, in part, on how much UI is paid out to company's employees.

That sounds a nightmare of bureaucracy to calculate!

I mean, that’s how most insurance premiums work.

Are you going to take legal action?

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