Termination of employment

Discriminatory and retalitory termination

In some cases, the firing of an employee is a discriminatory act. Although an employer may often claim the dismissal was for "just cause," these discriminatory acts are often because of the employee's physical or mental disability, or perhaps his/her age, race, gender, HIV status or sexual orientation. Other unjust firings may result from a workplace manager or supervisor wanting to retaliate against an employee. Often, this is because the worker reported wrongdoing (often, but not always sexual harassment or other misconduct) on the part of the supervisor. Such terminations are usually illegal. Many successful lawsuits have resulted from discriminatory or retalitory termination.

Discriminatory or retalitory termination by a supervisor can take the form of administrative process. In this form the rules of the instituton are used as the basis for termination. For example, if a place of employment has a rule that prohibits personal phone calls, receiving or making personal calls can be the grounds for termination even though it may be a common practice within the organzation.

Forced resignations

In addition to the risks and costs of firing an employee, firing a high-profile individual such as a school superintendent, an executive, or a public official often leads to rumor and factionalism; people who sympathized with the fired employee will be drawn against the person responsible for one's termination.

To avoid this, and to allow the dismissed employee to "save face" in a more "graceful" exit, the employer will often ask the employee to resign "voluntarily" from his or her position. If the employee chooses not to resign, the processes necessary to fire him or her will be pursued, and the employee will usually be fired. The resignation thus makes it unclear whether the resignation was forced or voluntary, and this opaqueness benefits both parties; for instance, the "fired" employee is more easily able to seek new employment in his/her given field.

High-profile individuals, when forced to resign from a job, will often claim that they resigned over "creative differences" or "to spend more time with their family". However, even these reasons can create rumors.

Changes of conditions

Firms that wish for an employee to exit of his or her own accord, but do not wish to pursue firing or forced resignation, may degrade the employee's working conditions, hoping that he or she will leave "voluntarily". The employee may be moved to a different geographical location, assigned to an undesirable shift, given too few hours if part time, demoted (or relegated to a menial task), or assigned to work in uncomfortable conditions. Other forms of manipulation may be used, such as being unfairly hostile to the employee, and punishing him or her for things that are deliberately overlooked with other employees.

Such tactics may amount to constructive dismissal, which is illegal in some jurisdictions.

Layoffs and furloughs

Finally, termination of employment can happen as a result of layoffs, also known as "downsizing", "reduction in force", or "redundancy", which are not firings. A laid-off employee's job is terminated and not re-filled, because the company wishes to reduce its size or operations, not for performance-related reasons. In rare cases, laid-off employees are re-hired by their respective companies, though by this time they have usually found new jobs.

If a company is in the process of either economic troubles and/or recent previous layoffs and they ask you to "cross-train" someone to fill in your duties "in case you are gone," chances are that a lay off process may proceed shortly.

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