During times of economic uncertainty, employers sometimes need to make difficult decisions. A reduction in the total workforce employed by an organization can help ensure the company’s continued solvency and ability to provide employment for the rest of its staff.
Layoffs can feel deeply personal for those who lose their jobs but can be beneficial for organizations and the people who can continue working at them because of those changes. Layoffs may be a necessary step for an organization struggling to maintain financial solvency, but the necessity doesn’t absolve the company of the obligation to comply with employment laws. Unfortunately, not every business upholds its responsibilities when deciding which workers to include in a layoff. Sometimes, a company’s decision to lay off certain workers exposes a pattern of discrimination.
Did mainly certain types of workers lose their jobs?
Making choices about who to hire and who to terminate or lay off you should be done as fairly as possible, which typically means that companies should not consider personal characteristics such as age, race, disability or sex when choosing who to employ or who to include in a layoff. Although many businesses try to be neutral, those making the decisions for the organization could have internal biases that quietly influence the choices they make.
Companies typically need to be very cautious about their layoffs to ensure that no one’s personal bias influences the career opportunities of other people. When there is a clear pattern involving protected characteristics regarding who gets laid off at a company, the affected workers could potentially have a claim for wrongful termination.
How wrongful termination claims help
Losing a job unexpectedly can put someone at a major disadvantage, especially if there are numerous other people who lose jobs in the same industry at the same time. The local employment market is likely to become oversaturated temporarily, making it difficult for workers to locate high-quality jobs that pay comparable wages to their former position.
A wrongful termination claim brought against an employer that has discriminated when making decisions about layoffs could compensate the affected workers financially or could potentially help them regain their employment. Reviewing the details of a layoff scenario with an experienced legal professional can help workers identify the warning signs of systemic discrimination that could possibly lead to a wrongful termination claim.