Workplace Mistreatment

Applies to the United States: federal statutes and regulations, plus named rules from California, Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Missouri and Utah. Not a substitute for advice from an employment attorney in your state. Quiet firing is a name for a sequence of management decisions, each lawful on its own: duties reassigned, hours cut, … Read more

Applies to the United States. Mobbing is a sequence, not a mood: an ordinary work conflict becomes a group behavior and then reaches management with the target already framed as the problem. Outside Puerto Rico, mobbing as such is not illegal in the United States; what is actionable is the narrow slice that maps onto … Read more

Applies to the United States. The signs your boss wants you to quit are not moods. They are stages of a file. Feedback moves into writing, scope shrinks, the standard moves, paper lands, an exit gets floated. Each sign tells you how far along the employer already is. A resignation costs the employer less than … Read more

Applies to the United States. Signing a written warning at work in a US private workplace almost never means agreeing with it. The signature line normally acknowledges receipt only. Refusing to sign is generally the worse move: it removes your chance to annotate the document and hands the employer a second story about non-cooperation. Sign, … Read more

Applies to the United States. A record holds up when it was made the day the thing happened, records what was seen and heard rather than what it meant, names who else was there, and lives somewhere the employer cannot delete or read. The second point is where logs fail. Everything below is US law … Read more

Applies to the United States. In a private, non-union US workplace you have no right to a lawyer in the meeting, no right to stay silent without being disciplined for it, no right to see the complaint against you, and no guarantee that what you say stays with HR. None of the four is a … Read more