Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

Wow, WILD story. Any armchair lawyers around to fill me in on the legality of firing someone in retaliation for suing you for discrimination…?

The details are here, he posted this link a while back: https://www.geekwire.com/2024/mozillas-product-chief-sues-th...

With some crazy quotes;

  On April 24, the suit says, Mozilla formally proposed to demote Teixeira to senior vice president of technology strategy, with a 40% reduction in total compensation. He declined to accept the role change. He had not requested additional flexibility related to his diagnosis, the suit says.

  The suit alleges that Chambers [new CEO] pressed ahead, informing other Mozilla leaders about the demotion, and telling   Teixeira’s direct reports that “it would be tough for him to continue to run a large team because of his health,” despite lacking his consent to share information about his health with others inside the company.

A) that’s a pretty slam-dunk case if they have witnesses to testify she said such things, and B) you can “decline to accept” a demotion?? I gotta try that next time!

On your B) It seems according to 15 minutes of research, it varies a bit on circumstance and where you live but it can be considered "constructive dismissal" in some places. You may be eligible for severance or unemployment if you refuse the demotion. Of course, IAMNAL etc...

This varies a lot on region, and even (for example in Canada) provincial jurisdiction, but I agree at the core this is a match.

I've seen constructive dismissal discussed for even adding on-call to someone who was hired without on-call requirements, unilaterally. The logic being "You're suddenly asking me to be paged at any time when on call, that wasn't part of the job description", and it is paramount to effectively "firing and re-hiring" a person in another role without their permission.

Why I mention legal jurisdictions, and the above example, is because some US states are 'at will' employment states. In such a state, you can just fire anyone at any time, and thus the whole "fired and re-hired" thing doesn't kick in... as the 'fire' part is a-ok.

People have contracts in such states, typically, especially at a CPO executive level. So I really wonder here, will this be more about breach of contract?

(Of course, there are other issues. The disclosure of medical info... that's just bizarre, and smacks of massive inexperience and lack of judgement, if true)

I don't know exactly how it works in the states, but I'm assuming you still sign a contract when accepting a job? That contract has all sorts on it, often including job title, expected responsibilities, work hours, etc.

If a company decides to change that then you must agree to the new contract, or they risk legal action. If you don't then their options are keep you where you are or fire you, and of course firing someone is it's own minefield, as shown here.

Contracts? In the states? Haha.. that's a good one.

Wait what? No employment contract?? Can you unpack this a little bit?

I uh… USians don’t do those. When they do, it tends to be a one-sided kind of thing to protect the company’s interests—NDAs, codes of conduct, accept our policies today and whatever we change them to in the future, that sort of thing.

Most places, work happens at the whim of the employer (and, for what little it’s worth, the whim of the employee): employment is “at-will,” states are “right-to-work,” and so on.

Don’t know about others, but I’ve never once in my life signed a contract to work in the US.

Wtf? So how do you know your current salary? How do you know your work hours?

This info often comes in the form of an offer letter that is accepted verbally or in writing.

In most cases employment in the US is at-will and does not involve a formal employment contract: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Your monetary compensation is in an offer letter you sign to accept the role. Salary exempt status is a fixed value per time period, or separately a hourly rate.

If paid hourly, you're typically entitled to 1.5x pay after 40 hours of work. Salaried exempt status are not mandated overtime pay.

What hours you work depends. Salaried is expecting a job to be done regardless of the hours to complete. Hourly is a mixed bag of "the schedule for next week is posted every Tuesday" (common in restaurants) or routine hours long-term (such as shift work in factories).

It's awkward to try to explain, but here are some pros and cons from other people. https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditForGrownups/comments/16606tt/...

Most tech positions don't have fixed work hours, beyond what's required by the law. The salary, position, benefits, etc. are the part of employment offer that you do sign, and there are employment handbooks etc. that you also acknowledge when you onboard, but from the company side the offer is usually the only document they sign.

You don't sign a contract buying something in the supermarket, yet a contract is still formed. You negotiated or discussed with the employer about pay and responsibilities, of course they are part of any such contract and their option is to dismiss you, not unilaterally change the terms.

This isn't the case even in EU, much less in US where they often don't sign any employment contract.

Regarding the EU thing: maybe I've just had an odd experience, but I've always signed employment contracts. Even when I was a student I had a contract from the company I worked at (it was a separate contract, not the usual student contract that I had to get also).

I can only speak to the UK where I have always been given a employment contract but it appears that something similar is a requirement in the EU

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/human-resources/employ...

>When you hire staff, you should provide them with a written contract or an equivalent written statement confirming their working conditions

The fact it can be a statement rather than a contract may have an impact on the companies ability to change it at any given time without agreement from the employee, but I'm not an EU employment lawyer

Every company I ever worked for had a "any changes are permitted, refusing means quitting" clause.

That is quite literally illegal where I live. Any annex to the contract (including base salary changes) must be _voluntarily_ signed by the employee. Forcing signing is illegal.

When covid started, my company gave all employees annexes to reduce our pay by 20%, but keep our workload the same. I told 2 bosses, the HR employee and the director of HR mobbing me I will not sign and to piss off. I was the only one to do so out of ~150 employees. I kept my full salary until I quit my job because I don't like working for cunts.

It definitely is the case in the EU. Where did you get the idea it isn't?

In my country, which is in the EU, having someone work for you without a contract is a crime. Because by not having a contract you're denying them rights such as pension contribution, paid vacation, health insurance etc.

Plus you have to pay taxes on salary, so if you hire them "on a handshake" as it were, you're probably doing tax evasion too.

I got the idea from my personal experience where I never was able to refuse what they told me. I'm not saying no contracts, I'm saying that refusing the change means I quit myself, and so no protection.

In Norway this is flatly illegal and the relevant government department would probably get involved. Here in Norway companies are legally required to make accommodations for people who fall ill in order to keep them working, so the new CEO would definitely be in the wrong regardless of whether such additional flexibility had actually been requested.

> B) you can “decline to accept” a demotion??

You probably can't simply decline it but you can certainly argue against it and if necessary sue in the courts depending on what your employment contract says. If he resigns then I think under UK law it is arguable that it is constructive dismissal:

"Constructive dismissal

Constructive dismissal is when you’re forced to leave your job against your will because of your employer’s conduct.

The reasons you leave your job must be serious, for example, they:

- do not pay you or suddenly demote you for no reason

- force you to accept unreasonable changes to how you work - for example, tell you to work night shifts when your contract is only for day work

- let other employees harass or bully you "

https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/unfair-and-constructive-dismiss...

While evil, it's common corporate practice (in the US) to get rid of new mothers and employees with deteriorating health, largely by looking for or fabricating trivial excuses to justify their termination. Corporate HR departments excel at finding legal excuses to dodge liability.

For B), in addition with the fact that a company can't reduce your title or compensation as agreed in your employment contract without your agreement, I can easily guess that in this case it was a proposition of change to accommodate for his health condition.

That it looks like that he refused as the proposition looks unsolicited.

This is one of the shittiest pieces of behaviour by an employer I've ever read about. Just awful.

Whilst this will make the square root of no difference, I don't want to support Mozilla with this sort of behaviour going on, so what do I do for a web browser now? I switched back to Firefox as my main browser some years ago because, well, Google and privacy concerns related to them. What now? Brave is dicey. Opera? SeaMonkey (which I think may nowadays be independent of Mozilla)?

The thing is I do a lot of web development so I need a browser that offers an at least decent developer experience on macOS.

Ladybird

Sure but Ladybird won't be released before Summer 2026...

Is the source not available to build a preview today?

Might be, but I doubt that it is a full-time replacement for a mature browser like Firefox today.

Brave with the shady features switched off. There’s still some privacy burden on the user, but it’s no comparison with Chrome and they’re pushing the envelope on privacy in other aspects.

Firefox forks are another option, depending on your reasons for avoiding the original.

>Brave with the shady features switched off

any examples? if you mean crypto and ads then these are opt in last time i checked.

>so what do I do for a web browser now?

Keep using Firefox (with uBO installed), but disable "Pocket" and switch off all the telemetry.

https://zen-browser.app/ is a browser based on the Firefox engine.

zen browser never successfully installed even after multiple tries on my computers.

This is probably a hot take but I’m gonna stay with Mozilla. We don’t have all the details, but it sure seems like a rotten C-suite, and I’m gonna count on the justice system to find the facts and mete out some, well, justice. Coca-Cola literally hired death squads to kill unionizing farmers, Chiquita did the same thing but like a few months ago, and Google is rotten in to the core of its motivations in a way that no amount of C-suite-clearing could help with — and yet I use all of their products, even when I try to avoid them.

But I have the whole “revolution” thing to fall back on, which is a nice emotional safety blanket. Boycotts are already very tough to use effectively, so I don’t have a ton of hope for using them without a real ethical alternative…

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