Comment by geoelectric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geoelectric | Hacker News Reader

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Here's CA's stance, and consider that CA is probably going to be the most protective state in the US when it comes to these things. Other states with decent labor protection mostly copied our laws.

https://workplacerightslaw.com/library/retaliation/construct...

My take:

The TL;DR is that it's just equivalent to getting fired. If you can prove you got shuffled out the door via constructive dismissal for reasons it's illegal to fire people for, then it's illegal. If at-will would've applied anyway, it's just a jerk move. Mostly it means you still get unemployment and can still sue for wrongful termination, even though you technically resigned.

What I suspect might be more of an issue, at least in CA, is that our at-will law has a "good faith" clause that basically implies you can't fire someone for a reason that would broadly be considered unethical in the context of an employer-employee business relationship. The classic example is canning someone just before they get their commissions purely to save yourself of the cost of paying them. My guess is that's one reason why Facebook, for example, is giving all their employees the mid-November vest even if they got fired first.

Constructively dismissing someone out the door probably takes away a lot of argument that you were acting in good faith.

If they promised these people that they could work remote and they invested in property then get forced to move, I actually wonder if it could open up the company to promissory estoppel (i.e., I had a financial loss based on a reasonable promise you broke, and now I want to recover).

The times I've heard about that cause in the past were exactly for situations where you moved for a job, then the job was rescinded. At the very least, that angle probably wouldn't look great in court during a wrongful termination suit.

(IANAL either, but since I work in CA I try to stay reasonably informed of the laws that affect me.)

> Other states with decent labor protection mostly copied our laws.

CA is not special protecting employees. It’s an at-will state. About the only useful thing it has is banning non-competes.

First, you’re dangerously wrong.

We’re one of the few states with both implied-contract and bad-faith codified as explicit exceptions to at-will, and we’re significantly more likely to resolve in favor of the employee than in most states because we actually mean them.

The only question is whether naysayers (usually management or people parroting what management said) convince employees that we’re strictly at-will and have no options if terminated, when we are not and often most certainly do.

Do you think the corporate expense of going through motions of PIPs for a month—and risking quiet quitting or even disgruntled employee retaliation in the meantime—would be a thing if they didn’t have to cover their own butts or risk a lawsuit they’d actually conceivably lose?

In states without these protections they generally just fire you. And I’m not even going to get into the protected class aspect where CA has many nuances, and “no reason” becomes awfully tricky to defend if challenged by the vast majority of workers who do fall within one.

So yes, realistically an employer needs a reason to safely fire you in CA.

That’s almost always quietly recognized and accommodated at our level via either a reason or a significant payoff out the door in exchange for a waiver of liability. We can sue the crap out of them and quite feasibly win if they don’t.

It’s only at the lowest level jobs where this gets completely ignored. That’s largely because employers are confident the min-wage folks aren’t going to sue them, same reason poor people get illegal leases around here that never get challenged.

Second, I never actually said we had special protection in my original post.

I said we had (among) the best protections, and that we provide the model for most other protective laws of this type in the USA. And I said it in the context that we were the high water mark for protection and even then the OP’s conjecture wouldn’t necessarily fall under it.

Think that’s all easily verifiable on your part. Not sure what else you think you’re disputing there.

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