The document said the position had been created with an eighteen-month review period, but the review date was only eight months after I was hired into it. I asked HR why a position described as strategic had already been scheduled for elimination before I even accepted it. They said the business case had been “updated” after my appointment. I asked to see the original version, and the dates didn’t match. The first version had been approved eight days before my promotion, and it already contained a recommendation to eliminate the role if certain objectives weren’t met. The problem was that nobody had ever given me those objectives.
I requested the emails surrounding the promotion and found that my director had described the position as a way to “transition existing responsibilities without disruption.” That phrase appeared again in a planning document written months earlier. My old team had been reassigned before I was promoted, and the new manager had been told not to include me in operational meetings. I had essentially been promoted out of my own job and then blamed for not contributing. Then I found an email from HR asking my director to “ensure the role has measurable outputs before the review date.” He replied that the role would be eliminated regardless.
I took the documents to an attorney, who said the timeline was more important than the wording. The company had created a position without resources, removed the responsibilities that would have made it useful, and then waited for the predetermined review date to call it unsuccessful. They offered me a settlement and asked me to sign a statement saying the position had been eliminated for business reasons. I refused until they corrected my personnel record and acknowledged that I had never been given the objectives they later used against me. They called me a steward when they promoted me, but the paperwork showed they had already decided I was only there to hold the place until they were ready to remove it.
