Unjustified Dismissal

So you have been sacked from work, what can you do about it?

If you have been unjustifiably dismissed it is a shock that can take time to understand. You have 90 calendar days to send your ex-employers a Personal Grievance, which doesn’t give people long to process what has happened. I can write this document for you describing the situation and how it has affected you. The Personal Grievance puts your ex-employer on notice you are starting a legal process against them.

An unjustified dismissal is one where there was no good reason to dismiss you, or no process used to investigate the situation, or both.

An employer dismissing an employee must generally show there was a good reason in the form of misconduct, and not just a misunderstanding. The employer does not have to show ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that misconduct occurred and can instead apply a lower standard of proof called ‘in all probability’.

A client I helped recently was fired after the employer looked at GPS data and said she had not attended job sites. The employee was having trouble driving due to morning sickness and wanted to keep her new pregnancy private. She got her Dad to drive her around the job sites. Her Dad drove his own vehicle, meaning the activity did not show up on the work GPS. The employer refused to listen to my client’s father’s evidence and dismissed my client saying they thought ‘in all probability’ the sites had been skipped. We got the dismissal thrown out because this employer had ignored vital evidence from my client’s eye-witness.

People facing dismissal can think what the boss is worried about is trivial. Take the issue of missing money. People may think $10 taken from the till is no big deal, not like thousands stolen in an elaborate scam. However, if the employer can show ‘in all probability’ which employee took the $10 and that they no longer trust the employee, termination may be justified in the circumstances.

Employers who want to dismiss people quickly without fully investigating the situation will be unlikely to show the termination is justified. A good process involves the employer giving the employee full information about allegations, allowing the employee to get a support person or representative when answering the allegations, and the employer must listen with an open, unbiased mind to the answers an employee gives.

If you have been told by your employer that you are guilty of something and you are “gone by Monday” without any process to gather your responses, we can certainly take a legal case for you and hold the employer to account for the way you have been treated. Please feel free to get in touch.