She was already crying when I picked up, and she said, “You need to listen carefully because I should never have told you this.” She explained that the January warning had been submitted to the HR firm in December, before the restructuring had even been announced. The person who signed it wasn’t my manager or anyone who had ever supervised me. It was a regional executive who had never spoken to me once. She said the warning claimed I had “repeated performance issues” and had refused several direct instructions. I knew immediately that none of those things had ever happened, because I had spent that entire period training the man who eventually signed my termination paperwork.
I asked her whether there was any evidence attached to the warning. She said there wasn’t, and that was what made her uncomfortable. The document had simply appeared in the file months before my termination, already written and signed. Then she told me the same executive had submitted warnings for three other employees who were later selected for the restructuring. I asked why the company would create disciplinary records before deciding who to let go. She said, “Because a layoff is expensive, but a documented performance termination is cheaper.” I sat there holding the phone and realized the restructuring speech had never been the whole story.
My attorney requested the original personnel file and compared the dates with my performance reviews. Every review before that January warning described me as exceeding expectations. We challenged the termination classification and demanded the company explain why a disciplinary record had been created months before the restructuring. They eventually admitted the warning had been improperly added to my file and removed it. I received the severance I should have received under the restructuring plan, plus compensation for the difference in benefits. The other employees filed their own complaints after I showed them what I’d discovered. They hadn’t found eleven people who suddenly became poor employees—they had created eleven bad records because they needed a reason to fire eleven people.
