Comment on Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her
Eccitaze@yiffit.net 5 months agoBasically, companies are required to pay for unemployment insurance that funds the government’s unemployment benefits system. If you lay someone off, the employee files for unemploent, and gets paid a portion of their weekly salary while they look for another job (the amount you get paid and whether there’s any additional requirements varies from state to state, with Democrat-controlled states usually being more generous, but generally you have to show you’re actively seeking a new job), and the employer pays a bigger unemployment insurance rate to compensate for the additional burden the former employee is now placing on the government benefits system.
However, if you’re fired for cause–say, you get caught stealing from the cash register–then the employer can contest your unemployment. If the employer can show you were fired for a good reason, the employee can be denied unemployment benefits, and the employer doesn’t have to pay extra unemployment insurance. This meeting is the company trying to cook up a justification for firing with cause, and the employee trying to get them to admit they’re just being laid off, because if the company admits during the exit interview that she’s just being laid off without cause, it’s nearly impossible to contest her unemployment benefits claim later.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah, I can now see why the whole thing is basically the groundwork for a legal fight.
That said she’s an amateur “lawyer” facing pros so the situation is stacked against her, plus she’s very nervous because she’s young and taking it personally, none of which are good for her side of the outcome.
It is extremelly unlikelly that a nervous amateur with a massive stake on the outcome will manage to get anything useful in a legal sense from a professional lawyer for whom the whole thing is just a job.
This might be one of those situations were the right strategy is to refuse to discuss it with the company’s legal team without your own legal advice present, or at least getting some legal advice upfront about what to get from them (say, documentation they’re obligated to provide).
As with everything, not being the “easy pickings” increases your chance that they’ll just give in and pay up simply because it’s not worth the risk (imagine it goes to court and their claims of “for cause” are trashed and the whole thing can be used by other ex-employees to get summary judgements against them or something similar).
If there’s something life has taught me (in a very painful way) is to lawyer-up as soon as there are legal implications (fortunatelly, over here firing “for cause” - i.e. laying off - has quite a higher standard of proof for the company and can’t just be on them making claims of underperformance).