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Comment by purplelobster | Hacker News Reader

Firing somebody in the UK is very difficult. No matter how aggravated he is, if the law is not on his side then there's nothing he can do.

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If the OP cannot legally fire this guy then it is time to depart that jurisdiction.

Law prevents the OP from just shooting the bastard, and rightly so. We surrender whatever right we may have to fight and kill on own our behalf, in return for protection from others and enforcement of just outcomes. The point is to remove our personal biases from interpretation of "just".

But if the sovereign jurisdiction won't allow this guy to fire someone who has done this, then its "law" has departed from its proper functions and can't be relied upon. I don't know what it is doing, but it isn't overseeing justice. I wouldn't wait to find out how it goes wrong next. I'd just leave.

Oh please, leave the jurisdiction? With his 30-40 employees? I'm sure he's gonna get right on that.

The guy is fireable in any country.

> The guy is fireable in any country.

Not at all. As aforementioned, you can't legally fire him in the UK (or Australia). Doing so would immediately welcome a legal battle with Fair Work (in Australia) and your chances of winning that one are slim to none.

I'm not familiar with the law in the UK. Could someone fill me in?

I'm confused as to how someone can be forced to continue to give money to someone that they don't want to continue giving money to? What if I decide I can't afford those employees because we aren't making enough money? Surely I can close down the business if I want to, effectively firing everyone?

> What if I decide I can't afford those employees because > we aren't making enough money?

Then in various jurisdictions you have to prove that. In court. See item 1 of http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/world/europe/28iht-letter.... and this sort of thing is not limited to France.

The US setup of at-will employment looks just as weird on that side of the Atlantic, I'm told, as theirs does to us.

I can't tell you what the setup is with being able to close down a business. It wouldn't terribly surprise me if there are legal hurdles to that too.

bankruptcy tourism is a thing

You can fire people, but you have to follow a certain procedure to do so, otherwise you put yourself at risk of being sued for wrongful dismissal. There are clauses in employment contracts to cover gross misconduct so that you can fire someone for stealing etc. If you can't afford the employee you can make them redundant - but there are rules about not filling a similar position for a certain amount of time thereafter to ensure that it's not used as a way of firing people just because you don't like them. If an employee does their job and does it well you should not be able to just fire them because you're having a bad hair day. To me as UK citizen, your system looks like a crazy free-for-all. To each their own I suppose. :-)

Incidentally, IANAL - the above is essentially right but I'm not an employer and only have an employee's view of things.

I prefer a law making it legal to fire at any time except for a blacklist of protected reasons like race, gender. In an at-will united state, I hope adultery can't be misconstrued as a protected reason for not being able to fire....

It wouldn't work like that in New Zealand. Outside of work, consenting adults etc. The employee could just argue that the employer was acting unprofessionally during work hours despite the employee being professional at all times during work hours. If this firing was handled poorly the employer would likely face massive costs. NZ law has UK law as its origin.

Now, I don't think employers should need a reason to fire employees. That said, I think such laws aren't such a clear cut injustice like you're making them out to be. Not everyone believes in unlimited freedom of contract, and not being able to terminate employment contracts over personal issues wholly outside the scope of employment is not an inconceivably unjust limitation.

As someone who's worked in HR in the UK (albeit 15 years ago) and hired and fired people there I can see zero reason to not fire the guy.

As someone who considered law in his teens 15 year ago, I see zero reason to consider this valid legal advice.

as someone who never claimed it to be legal advice I fail to see why you SHOULD consider it valid legal advice

doesn't mean I wouldn't fire the guy's ass because I have yet to see a plausible argument for what negative legal consequences might befall me if I did

IANAL, but I'm fairly sure a tribunal would look quite favourably on a company which fired someone for adultery when it had destroyed working relationships. I think it would come under the 'gross misconduct' provision.

I am not familiar at all with UK law, in California you can show someone the door because they hum out of tune if you want, its the other side of the 'right to work' thing.

But if you, or someone reading, knows UK law, is there anything that prevents you from renting an separate office with a telephone and re-assigning him to work in that office? Still pay him and all but just keep him out of the way where he can't do any more damage.

The UK has restrictions on why you can fire people (unlike CA which is at will), but they're largely quite fair (IMO). See https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/overview

According to that link you can be fired for "Gross Misconduct", which seems about right in this case.

I don't see how screwing around has anything to do with professional conduct.

> in California you can show someone the door because they hum out of tune if you want,

Really? So you can show them the door for anything then? In California, can you fire someone for their racial background? For their gender? For their age? Religion? Family status?

I suspect a lot of this thread is just a bunch of software types pretending to know what the law is (myself included). Best advice on this whole discussion: talk to a lawyer.

Firing people in Portugal is also hell, but loopholes exist in every law; I'm sure it's not different in the UK. My favorite, which also appears applicable to this case is: promote him into a top managerial position, then fire him for breach of trust (top managerial positions require trust from shareholders, the board and the CEO)

Speak to a lawyer, though. IANAL, obviously.

> My favorite, which also appears applicable to this case is: promote him into a top managerial position, then fire him for breach of trust (top managerial positions require trust from shareholders, the board and the CEO)

You can't retroactively apply "breach of trust" in this situation though, and promoting him with the intention of firing him (which would be obvious) won't help your case.

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