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Comment by dbmnt | Hacker News Reader

Holy shit though, who thought this email (or Slack message or whatever) in the middle of an ongoing disaster was a good idea? This is the equivalent of asking you to make sure you file your TPS report. Honestly why do they give a shit about the knobs in the RTO portal? They can see if people are based in LA already. Benefit of the doubt, etc.

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There's a separate announcement showing some support and asking everyone in LA to WFH, which isn't mentioned in the article

Also not updating the RTO portal won't cause any penalty from what I've heard, and ppl can update the WFH status anytime, e.g. marking their whole month as natural disaster WFH in advance if they really care, which no one really does

> why do they give a shit about the knobs in the RTO portal

They don’t. They care about having legal cause to terminate employment, as is the style at the time

I think California is an at-will state, so you wouldn’t need cause to terminate.

Every state in the US is an at will state except for one.

Yes, I know, and in fact I checked before posting.

I was using “I think” as a conversational affordance to give OP a less confrontational way in to disagreeing with me, if even in an at-will state, termination for cause is better for the employer for some reason (I couldn’t find one when searching, but it’s not an area I am knowledge about).

You don't. But they want to minimize avenues to get sued because people can and probably will file an wrongful termination lawsuit.

I don't know the exact laws, but given California I would not be surprised if there's a "no, you cannot fire someone who's in the hospital over a state of emergency" clause. Similar to how you can't fire an employee to avoid workman's comp.

Or worse, it's not there and they set precedent.

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