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Terminating An Employer Employee Relationship

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Terminating an employer-employee relationship, no matter the reason, is one of the most difficult situations that a manager will face in their career and easily one of the most unpleasant parts of the job. Terminating an employee is risky business, and it’s a manager’s obligation as an agent of the company to do so in the legal confines of the United States law. Terminations happen every day at every level of an organization, in companies big and small. Therefore, it is in the best interest of all companies to have knowledgeable managers handling terminations. When is at-will employment not employment at-will? Can managers identify legal and illegal reasons to fire someone? This paper will not debate the ethical or social …show more content…

In addition, this paper will explore what constitutes a wrongful discharge under three main common law exceptions to employment at will in the Public-policy exception, the Implied-contract exception, and the Covenant-of-good-faith exception. Finally, the paper recommend some course of action for organizations to put in place to mitigate high-risk terminations. High-risk terminations are those instances in which employers are faced with decisions to terminate employment of employees whose circumstances likely fall within one or a combination of statutory and common law exceptions to the at-will doctrine discussed below. The risk of being sued is reduced when there is a clear, non-discriminatory and well-documented cause for termination. Like much of the United States’ common law, employee and employer rights within the United States can trace its roots back to England. According to the Statute of Laborers, a general hiring of labor for an unfixed term was presumed to be for a year, and a “master” could not “put away his servant” except for “reasonable cause.” Employment at-will’s origin in the United States have been hotly debated by legal scholars and there is still not a consensus as to where employment at-will doctrine actually developed. Traditionalists suggest that

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