Constructive Dismissals. Can we talk about these?
For the uninitiated, here is the Wikipedia article.
I'm an old man, now. But in that time I've been through at least three of these beauties.
First time I was written up for how I greeted customers in a letter response (I said “Greetings”, instead of “Hello”). There was a bunch of other nonsense in the performance review, but that stuck out to me as absolute garbage. I didn't understand what was happening and lost the job.
Second time, a peer tried to bully me. Like real aggressive shit. When I complained about her to the VP, the VP responded by giving me a poor performance review and removing me from my position. They put me on a special project that was an obvious waste of time. They said I'd be reevaluated in three months. Two months later they reevaluated me another poor performance. I fought back and got a lawyer to contact them and make some demands. They reinstated my into a lower position (same pay); but by then I was working a second job and didn't really care. I strung it along for a few months for extra cash and left.
I still can't believe they had a peer bully me to try and create a reason to terminate me. Fucking savages.
Now, my boss writes a blank performance review with only number ratings. All low. He gives me no time to discuss or read it, and asks me to acknowledge and approve. I rejected it and submitted an ethics complaint to the company lawyer.
Why the fuck do they do this? It causes so much stress, it takes so much unnecessary time to respond to each stupid accusation on “objectives” that totally have nothing to do with the job description.
Companies come up with all these “Values” and “Behaviors” and this goes against all of it. Yet THEY ALL DO IT. I'm at six figures in engineering and pharmaceuticals (pharmaceuticals seems to LOVE doing this).
Someone in HR help me. Why do they do it?! If I'm at will anyways, why create performance issues to terminate me? Why drag it out months to create a pattern? Does anyone know the history of how it developed into such a ubiquitous practice? I have an MBA, no one taught me this in business school. Why is it so common? News articles do plenty of stories about quiet quitting, why not a story about the ubiquitous skirting of labor laws?
This can't be just to avoid unemployment claims. Of course unemployed people are going to file, and they'll still have to fight them. But it seems like this is how they get seasonal workers – instead of contractors, hire permanent employees and give them impossible objectives. Terminate them for performance issues in a year or two.