Anytime you are fired from a job or forced out of your role you may feel that it is wrong or unjust. There is a difference, however, between feeling wronged for being fired and your employer actually committing wrongful termination. Continue reading to discover more about how employers hide wrongful termination and contact an Atlanta wrongful termination attorney if you believe your employee rights have been violated.

What is Wrongful Termination?

Most jobs are at-will, meaning that the employee can quit at any time and the employer can fire you at any time for generally any reason, as long as the reason is legal. When an employer does terminate your employment for an illegal reason it is known as wrongful termination. Some laws protect employees from termination for unfair reasons. Illegal reasons for termination can include the following.

• Retaliation
• Discrimination
• Whistleblowing
• Citizenship status
• Violation of law or public policy
• Refusing to take a lie detector test

If your employer terminated you or a coworker due to any of the above reasons, they are breaking the law and violating your employment rights. It is unfortunately common for employers to wrongfully terminate an employee and then attempt to hide their wrongdoing.

What Are Some Examples of Ways Employers Try to Hide Wrongful Termination?

There is really no way to hide the fact that an employee is no longer welcome to work at a company. However, when employers engage in illegal wrongful termination, they may try to hide it to avoid the repercussions of their actions. There are several ways they may try to conceal wrongful termination, including the following.

Progressive discipline: Perhaps the most common way employers attempt to hide wrongful termination is by citing performance issues. More often than not the employee had no prior issues. However, maybe they reported an incident of discrimination or harassment against a superior. Now the company wants to fire the employee and keep the superior, but they cannot fire the employee right away or it will be suspicious. Instead, they use a tactic known as progressive discipline where they begin looking for issues with the employee’s performance and creating documentation so that a few weeks or months later they will have enough “evidence” to fire the employee seemingly legally.

Eliminating your position: Sometimes a role at a company is not needed and truly does get eliminated. However, this is another way to hide wrongful termination. Your employer may tell you that the position is obsolete so they can let you go for another reason. Then they might rename the role with a new title and hire someone else.

Downsizing: When the economy is bad and people are not spending as much, mass layoffs can occur. However, downsizing is a common way that companies are able to hide their wrongful terminations. Because there are many people getting fired it does not draw as much attention when they select an employee that, for example, is of a certain race or age.