LOS ANGELES - More and more, workers who think they
were fired wrongfully are suing their former bosses.
People who keep up with the issue say such litigation accounts
for about half the civil injury suits handled by labor law
attorneys.
And, in a turnabout from the early years of such litigation when
only highly paid executives sued, half the suits now are brought by
non-management employees, according to a researcher studying the
issue.
``There is a tremendous willingness of employees to sue
employers,'' said Paul Grossman, a lawyer who handles such cases,
mostly in defending managers.
Since a California court ruled in 1979 that employers do not
have an unfettered right to dismiss workers at will, there has been
a virtual explosion in the area of wrongful-discharge suits.
``This is a major growth area,'' said William B. Gould IV, a
professor at the Stanford University Law School in Palo Alto, Calif.
The flood of such suits has made companies more reluctant to
dismiss workers, more thorough in documenting reasons for a firing
and more cautious about the reasons they give for termination - both
to the worker and to future employers.
Besides suing for being terminated, some workers have filed and
won libel suits against their ex-bosses for comments that damaged
their reputations.
Grossman, of the Los Angeles law firm of Paul, Hastings,
Jenofsky & Walker, said his company has between 600 and 700 active
wrongful-discharge cases, compared to about 20 six years ago.
Grossman's firm is a leader in labor law that works mainly for
management.
The trend toward wrongful-discharge actions has spread to most
of the rest of the nation, but California remains the hotbed of such
litigation, said Jim Dertouzous of Rand Corp., a prominent research
center based in Santa Monica, Calif.
``California is by far the most liberal state in its
interpretation of the law,'' Dertouzous said.
By the end of 1985, all but 10 states recognized restrictions on
employers' ability to fire at will, he said. At the very least, they
provided protection for ``whistleblowers'' who report misdeeds of
their bosses, he said.
Even broader - and, from employers' viewpoint, more nettlesome -
are emerging legal doctrines that employment itself constitutes an
implied contract and that employers must actively try to help
workers who are having trouble rather than just firing them.
While those doctrines are new to the United States with its
tradition of giving companies free rein, employers in Japan, Europe
and elsewhere historically have been far more restricted in their
ability to dismiss workers.
The California Supreme Court is expected to decide before the
end of the year a case that may help resolve some uncertainties in
the law and possibly affect many other cases. …
