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In an ideal situation, our employers treat us as well as we treat them. The relationship is symbiotic, at its best, and all parties benefit when everyone is happy.
That seems like an easy concept to grasp, and the one that works the best for everyone involved should be what people choose, but for some reason, this isn’t always the case. One end of the agreement or the other breaks down, and we find ourselves on the outs and looking for a way to improve our lives.
In this woman’s case, she went through a management change at work that she sensed wasn’t going to go her way in the end.
First, some background. A bit over 6 months prior to the start of this story, we had a change up at the company I worked for. The old owner was a great guy that was retiring and handing the company off to his son, a real POS just out of business school type.
The son, with the mentality that the company is now his, went about restructuring, namely reassigning teams to different projects, and leaving those that remained in their old positions to pick up double—if not triple—the workload. He did this all in the name of saving a little money. Unfortunately my department (safety/engineering, of which I was the team lead) was not spared from this effort.
In the end I had it out with the boss and department head, ultimately costing the company 3 months of my entire department working 80+ hour weeks, and forcing a huge year end bonus to be paid out to us.
And that went double after the new boss took an icky liking to her and refused to get the hint until she got a lawyer involved.
Unfortunately after my initial meeting with the new boss (i.e. the son), he took a liking to me (in a really bad way). Essentially he really liked me, and wanted to go out with me, or sleep with me, or however you want to put it. He even enlisted his friends and secretaries to help him! It went on for months, just blatant sexual harassment.
They even made comments about me losing my late husband, that I should just get back on the horse (so to speak). I kept everything—every email, every voice mail—and went to my best friend who happens to be a really good lawyer (a contract lawyer, to be exact; so not exactly their area of expertise, but they knew enough to help).
This friend drafted a letter to the boss, essentially a “stop or we’re going to start a big case over this” kind of thing, and yah everything stopped.
She was moved to a work-from-home situation that she suspected was done to get rid of her slowly, and then a gross email chain revealed she was right – they were looking for a way out.
However, I was then moved from working in-office to a work-from-home arrangement. I knew what was coming: they were going to do their best to get rid of me, so I started documenting everything. But as luck would happen I received an email chain from the bosses—a good friend of mine in the office who was in the email chain added me to the cc list. And wouldn’t you know, it was back-and-forth communication of them discussing how they would get rid of me and pin the blame on me.
The email chain was just disgusting. They hated me so badly and wanted me gone, but because of my contract they would have to buy me out. But being the cheapskates they are you know they wanted me gone for free, so the company bosses started a campaign to try and torment me.
They first tried to say that because now I work from home they were required to install cameras in my home office to make sure I was being productive; luckily that did not work (you have to love contracts). They also tried assigning and impossible workload to me, but luckily my team and I were almost like family and they picked up the slack.
After she got a message saying that she was going to be laid off indefinitely because there was no work for her, she got her lawyer friend involved again.
After 3 months of this crap I get an email and a phone call from the HR department saying I was getting laid off indefinitely because there was just no work for me. This was complete bullshit given that we had several dozen projects we were working on. (On a side note: in Ontario there is no such thing as a layoff, as—in the court’s eyes—being laid off is considered an active dismissal, which is essentially the same as being fired)
After this conversation with HR I call my lawyer friend, almost in tears just shouting “look what they are doing to me! HELP!”
The lawyer calmed her down and said they had plenty of evidence, and that this could only end up in her favor.
OP dug in and started compiling as much information as she could find (which was a good thing, since they remotely wiped her work laptop soon afterward).
She calms me down and tells me “this is such a good thing: we have so much evidence against them.” I had already forwarded and printed everything off that was sent to me, and it was lucky I did because a scant few hours after I was laid off my computer was remotely wiped clean; everything was gone, leaving just a blank desktop.
When I called the HR department to get copies of all my filed complaints, what do you know: everything was gone. In their place was a bunch of bullshit reprimands that never happened—that I never signed or saw—dating months and months back, and all signed by the new boss, despite the fact that they were dated before he ever took control of the company. It was clear they were total bullshit, but I got copies of everything to add to my stack of records.
I texted all my old colleagues to let them know what was happening, and that I am basically gone. Like I said earlier, we were like family, and with me on the way out they started looking for better employment. Not only that, but they contacted all their friends who worked for the company to do the same.
They went on the offensive, handing the employer a summons to mediation.
I was “laid off” on a Monday, and on Thursday I walked into the office with my employment lawyer. I swear, the main secretary was on the phone to security the second she saw me walk in, and they were at the door in a matter of a minute. My lawyer simply handed her a legal document: a summons to meet for mediation at his office on the next Friday.
More than a few people tried to convince her to come back, to drop it, to forgive and forget, but she wasn’t having any of it at that point.
Good for her.
During the following week I received so many calls and text messages from the bosses, friends, secretaries, and people I knew in the office to just be friendly with the owner, to just drop it, and that they wanted to bring me back and forget about everything (like hell I was going back to such a hostile work environment).
At the mediation, they brought lawyers and a bunch of bluster, but OP and her attorney had the paper trail on their side.
Friday finally comes and into my lawyer’s office my former boss walks in with a squad of 4 of his lawyers to settle the matter. And off the bat he offers me 3 months severance to end all of this because I didn’t have any evidence to rebut the fake paperwork they had on file.
At this point my lawyer starts to bring out all the paperwork we had, namely copies of every complaint I had ever filed which were all signed by the bosses, HR, and myself. Luckily for our case, I had made sure to take a copy of each complaint when it was written up. They didn’t think I had anything? Oh boy were they wrong.
They laid everything out on the table and the other side could tell pretty quickly that there was no point in trying to bs the situation any longer, no matter what it cost them to make her go away.
My lawyer made the case that in court it’d be obvious that all the paperwork they had on their end were forgeries: nothing was signed by me, and he pointed out that there were dates with the boss’ signature where he wasn’t in the country, let along working for the company yet. At that point the boss and his lawyers went to speak privately.
After about a half an hour they came back with a much better offer: a full year’s salary. But my lawyer was like “nah, we’ll just go with what the contract says plus go for damages in court”
They thought they could get away with a “generous” offer of a year’s severance.
Generous, maybe, if they hadn’t been huge harassing a$$holes leading up to the situation.
Given the recent change-over at the company, the lawyers seemed to know they couldn’t afford this going to court, not to mention it would be so bad for the company’s reputation. So they basically rolled over and asked “what do you want?”. We demanded 5 years salary + the average bonus I would have made for each year + all the legal fees paid. It was a big big win. But it didn’t end there. I got a taste of blood and wanted more.
OP proved again to be the better (if not bigger) person, finding jobs for the other members of her team who wanted to leave the now flailing company.
I made phone calls to several companies where I had contacts and found jobs for every member of my team (and several members of other teams). By the end of a week the company lost 10 of its most talented people. Not to mention most of those people had friends and colleagues that ended up following them to their new employers.
Things there went from bad to worse in the wake of the management change and all of the upheaval in the months since.
The fallout was pretty bad. Before all of this they had the pick of the litter when new university students graduated. But now—because they lost almost all of their senior people—they had no one to mentor new employees. Plus word got out fast how they treat workers like crap, so no one with any talent would even think of getting near the company.
As of today the company is just a shell of its former self. It’s still big, but it bleeds money. They also now have a problem with permanent staffing and are paying out the nose to hire subcontractors. Let’s just say they don’t make money like they used to. In fact, they have not started any new projects in something like 9 months. If something isn’t done on the side of management to improve things fast, they will likely be going bankrupt in the very near future.
It turns out OP was lucky to get out when she did, but man, if this isn’t proof that who runs a place and how really matters, I don’t know what else is.
I don’t know about you, but I sure would love to get 5 years of full pay to figure out what I was going to do next in my life.
I hope she’s enjoying it, because she sure earned it!
