If you are terminated without cause you are entitled to reasonable notice of your termination or the employer may elect to pay you your salary for the notice period and terminate you immediately. What this means is that assuming the appropriate notice period is 6 months, the employer has the option of saying to you on January 1 that as of June 30 your services will no longer be required, but that in the meantime you will continue on as an employee until June 30 which will be your last day of employment.. However, most employers prefer not having potentially disgruntled terminated employees in their workforce, and accordingly most employers will say to an employee on January 1 that today is your last day and here's 6 months salary and you're out of here.
The trick in any given case is to determine what is "reasonable notice". What makes employment law interesting is that there is no hard and fast formula to determine "reasonable notice" in any such given case. This is good for lawyers as it keeps them busy, but it's bad for everyone else because no one knows where they stand, and that includes employers and employees. Legal scholars all agree that the law should be as certain as possible so that people can conduct themselves accordingly. However, in employment termination cases the law is not certain or predictable, and because of that litigation often follows a termination.
At one point the courts were so clogged with employment termination cases where employees' lawyers were clamouring for very long notice periods and employers' lawyers were demanding very short notice periods that a judge decided to try to inject an element of certainty into the law and he devised a rule of thumb of awarding one month of notice for every year of the employee's service. So a employee of 7 years of service would be entitled to 7 months of notice. The judge then added the proviso that the resulting notice period could be adjusted up or down somewhat depending on a few other factors.
The trick in any given case is to determine what is "reasonable notice". What makes employment law interesting is that there is no hard and fast formula to determine "reasonable notice" in any such given case. This is good for lawyers as it keeps them busy, but it's bad for everyone else because no one knows where they stand, and that includes employers and employees. Legal scholars all agree that the law should be as certain as possible so that people can conduct themselves accordingly. However, in employment termination cases the law is not certain or predictable, and because of that litigation often follows a termination.
At one point the courts were so clogged with employment termination cases where employees' lawyers were clamouring for very long notice periods and employers' lawyers were demanding very short notice periods that a judge decided to try to inject an element of certainty into the law and he devised a rule of thumb of awarding one month of notice for every year of the employee's service. So a employee of 7 years of service would be entitled to 7 months of notice. The judge then added the proviso that the resulting notice period could be adjusted up or down somewhat depending on a few other factors.
This indeed introduced an element of certainty and my estimate is that employment termination cases for a period of time declined precipitously. When a 10 year employee was terminated the employer would consider 10 months notice and then make an offer of 8 months reasoning that the employee was young and had marketable skills that would make re-employment an imminent likelihood. The employee through counsel usually would rejoin that the employee was really not all that young and his skills had become stale and that 12 months was a more appropriate figure. They would ten of course settle on 10 months.
RSS Feed