Reddit Taken To SF Court for Firing Worker With Anxiety: Lawsuit::A former Reddit staffer was fired for “poor performance” after taking three months of sick leave, a lawsuit filed in San Francisco alleges.
Lol that’s like the only time you can’t fire someone in the US, is after unpaid FMLA sick leave.
Or in retaliation for reporting sexual harassment, or for whistleblowing to OSHA¹, or for getting pregnant, …
¹ Or to the SEC, IRS, EPA, NRC, etc.; but not “whistleblowing” on your blog.
Don’t forget for trying to form a union too!
Yep.
FMLA doesn’t just protect the time off, but the arrival back to work. You do need the physician to document that there will be restrictions on job functions. This can be done retroactively as I learned.
Reddit fucked that up badly
Would they have been better off firing the employee (on their return to work) without providing any reason?
Would they be able to convince a jury that the firing had nothing to do with the medical leave? I doubt it. The lawsuit still would have happened.
No. While at will employment protects an employer against most forms of wrongful termination, FMLA, from my understanding, superscedes it.
I am not a lawyer so I’m not certain.
However, after your work restriction period ends, then your employer can fire you.
My work has a client who has an employee that can’t be fired because he is disabled and on permanent intermittent FMLA. Dude has so much porn on his work computer and nobody can do anything about it.
Damn more echoes of Xitter, this is almost exactly what they did as well lmao
I suppose spez did say he looked up to Elon. I wonder when he’ll install an illegal “Reddit” sign on the roof of his HQ?
“R”
On the same level of shitty SEO of “X”.
“Y”
Are we pronouncing Xitter like ‘shitter’?
Makes sense to.
Well I am now
I have been.
At this point working for any form of corporate social media seems like a bad idea.
I disagree, I think this kind of firing is very common and most workers don’t have enough power to fight back, unlike tech workers. Can you imagine how much this court case is going to cost them if they don’t win?
True, but I thought most employment lawyers worked on contingency when it comes to employees.
That’s generally the case.
They do, and the government has lawyers that review your case for free as well. The very first step in the complaint process is to file with the EEOC or a state agency. If they decide not to sue, you hire a lawyer on contingency and go to court.
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The fact that it took public outcry for them to begrudgingly fire an admin who was using reddit as their own personal pedophilic hunting ground is a coincidence, I’m sure.
I’ve been in a situation similar to this but it wasn’t clearly illegal of my employer. The pandemic exacerbated my depression and anxiety significantly (and unmasked ADHD), so my performance fell considerably. They didn’t take any of that into consideration however.
Lesson learned – self identify as having a disability. Employers are required by law to ask that, and depression and anxiety are considered disabilities for it. Get it on record so you have a stronger legal case if they do fuck you over.
I had a boss once tell me if I didn’t “get over” my anxiety I’d never get the promotion I was after. My promotion requests kept getting shot down after that, even though I was already doing the work and had two different bosses arguing for it.
I ended up quitting and going elsewhere.
I don’t bring up anxiety unless it’s on paper now.
It’s tough too when you have different bosses over the years. I had one that was super encouraging and understanding, and she told me she took mental health days too. She even recommended a therapist some of her friends saw – they didn’t turn out to really be what I needed, but I still greatly appreciate the gesture.
The supervisor I had after that was incredibly sympathetic too. I did open up to him a bit, and he told me that his wife struggled with bipolar. He was super understanding when I said that I wanted to work from home from my family’s place for a while.
Now that I think about it, my supervisors in general were all pretty great (and millennials/young Gen X). The managers a level up were all pretty great too, and encouraged me to put my health first. The problem was the company policies, and that tied a lot of hands.
Oh hey, I was also fired because of my anxiety. Fun stuff. And by that I mean fuck them.
We can’t treat people like human beings, we have to make money!
So glad I didn’t get hired there.
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They’re all unpaid and probably classified as power users. So they have no employment protections.
It’s not that easy to “ban” people in the real world, bitch.
And that’s my friends, an employee burndown.
