Legal Risk & Opportunity in Employment Paper

Legal Risk and Opportunity in Employment

LAW531

December 6, 2010

Judy Gray

Legal Risk and Opportunity in Employment

Business managers face many responsibilities and make important decisions that must align to the organization’s core business strategies and mission that can affect the workers. I will discuss NewCorp’s legal risks and the legal principles that will support its decisions with three different issues involving a wrongful discharge, sexual harassment, and workplace safety in this business simulation.

Legal encounter one

Pat was hired as a manager to maintain and deal with lessees for office spaces by NewCorp, a commercial real property company in Vermont. Therefore, Pat had to relocate his family to get closer to the area because NewCorp is 300 miles away from their current location in which Pat’s wife had to quit her current position and seek employment close by. Only three months into the position with NewCorp, Pat was notified by management that the company will let him go. He believed that NewCorp was not experiencing any economic problems before he took the job; therefore, the company did not provide him full details to the termination decision. According to the personnel manual, it stated that unsatisfactory performance by employees should be notified and placed in a correction plan. However, Pat did not receive this notification to correct and to improve his job performance in satisfactory and acceptable level. At this point, Pat can argue that he is wrongfully discharged without proper assessment of his job performance and was not given the opportunity to improve his performance level according to the company’s personnel manual.

If Pat is wrongfully discharged, he can use the employee manual as his defense that this manual is an implied contract between NewCorp and an employee. Parks and Schmedemann (1994) stated that lawyers examine and understand the wording in employee handbook that promises procedural protections...