Legal Risk and Opportunity in Employment
Business Law
LAW/531
October 1, 2008
Legal Risk and Opportunity in Employment
The reason for this paper is to discuss three legal encounters involving NewCorp, a fictitious company in Vermont. The author of this paper is required to provide with a brief but substantial advice at the end of each encounter.
Legal Encounter One
Pat Grey is a new manager of real property for the NewCorp Company in Vermont. Pat has made a great sacrifice to move his family, sell and buy a new home and asked his wife to resign her job for him to take this new endeavor. Pat is responsible for activities related to maintaining leased office space. Pat has turn into an active member at the local school board. Pat believes that the school sports’ funds should be evenly divided among all student athletic programs, not just concentrated on the boy’s football and basketball programs and he is very vocal about it at the meetings. Unfortunately, his position is very unpopular. Senior management at NewCorp was noticeably unfriendly after the incidents at the meetings and Pat believes that they are influenced by them. However, no one at the school board has identified Pat as an employee of NewCorp.
Pat’s boss has decided to discharge him with 30 days severance with no other explanation than things are not working out. Pat has been on the job for three month and was not aware that he was having problems in his performance. Additionally, Pat has a copy of the employee manual and says:
Notice of Unsatisfactory Performance/Corrective Action Plan, if the job performance of an employee is unsatisfactory, the employee will be notified of the deficiency and placed on a Corrective Action Plan (CAP). If the employee performance does not improve to a satisfactory level within the specified period of time, termination will follow.
Pat signed an understanding that the company observed employment at will with respect of employment and discharge; however,...