There are times when a firing is justified despite your good faith effort to do a good job. In fact, you may have even seen it coming, especially if you have gotten warnings in the past. There are times when a firing is completely unjustified. In fact, it can even be illegal.
Not all companies are interested in social justice and will look for ways to fire minorities or protected classes of workers. In these cases, people are facing wrongful termination in Indiana or whichever state they live in. it isn’t easy to prove especially if you are an at-will employee.
You should look for some signs like the following to determine if you were wrongfully terminated.
1. Promises violated
Not everybody gets a work contract, but those that do often have a high level of protection. When an employer fires you seemingly without cause, it is that contract that is going to be the proof you need for a claim of wrongful termination.
If you were contracted to work for a certain amount of time and are let go before that length of time passes then you have a very clear cut case of wrongful termination.
There are even promises that are made when you don’t have a contract that acts as an unwritten contract.
Any correspondence in which an employer says that they will do something is actually binding as if it were a written contract. These promises that go unmet can also be grounds for a wrongful termination claim.
2. A public policy was violated
Sometimes a company breaks the rules that are in place to protect workers from discrimination and exploitation. They may find these rules to be inconvenient but they are bound to work within the rules. If a policy was violated and you were let go then this will be in your favor.
There are protected classes of workers, for instance, that can’t be fired as a result of their classification. For instance, a pregnant worker is protected from being fired because she needs to take maternity leave for childbirth.
She can’t even be fired for needing to express breastmilk during work hours for her baby. Likewise, a minority can’t be fired for being a minority as this is a clear-cut case of discrimination.
3. Retaliation
If you recently asked for time off and got resistance from the management and then were fired for some spurious reason, this could be a sign of retaliation.
There are more obvious examples, such as you complained about an unsafe practice that the company is doing and then got fired shortly after.
Retaliation is illegal and is a very common reason for wrongful termination. Rather than fix problems or accommodate reasonable requests from employees, some companies will fire them considering them bad team players.
If you got an evaluation for work performance that says you are not a team player then this is a very common sign that retaliation was the motivation for you getting fired.
