X ordered to pay €550k to Irish employee fired after yes-or-resign ultimatum

It should be called unknown vacation. There’s a limit, you just don’t know where it is.

I assume if you took the UK legal minimum of 5.6 weeks for example, you would get fired.

If this was a conversation between equals, I think you might have a point, but the balance of power between employee and employer (especially when it’s a huge corporation) lies firmly on the side of the employer.

An employee has needs that sometimes cannot go untended, s/he has rent/mortgage payments, s/he may have family to take care of, loan repayments, children at non-free school, etc etc. This is normal, and the paraphernalia of living a life. They are long-term commitments.

So if the employee is presented with an ultimatum like this, it really amounts to “rip up your life, or take the new (worse) offer we are giving you”. It smacks of Vader’s famous line: “I am altering the deal. Pray that I don’t alter it any further”. You may prefer living in a world where corporations can wreak havoc with employees lives without consequence (like Vader) but I don’t.

Leaving the country at the end of this year and returning back to the UK. I came here for the money and the weather. The weather is now too damn hot, and I’ve made enough money to retire (in the UK at least) and look after my wife after an American hospital utterly destroyed her life, putting her into a coma after trying to “turn beds” like restaurants “turn tables”. I so much wish I’d done this 2 years ago, life would have been very different if I had.

This is one of those “left hand doesn’t talk to the right” situations. Delta has an arm of the company that only deals in disputes and has another arm that does check in and routine services. I think the manager did a good job here - I highly doubt there is a listed provision for allowances like this, but she paid anyways because she understood what the right thing to do was after confirming everything was legit. Unfortunately, companies have to play so defensively because they hold so much power, otherwise people will take advantage and bleed them dry. Note that this isn’t a political comment, I’m not interested in what should be, rather what is. If a company makes an honest mistake, courts will typically side with the less powerful party when possible. For example, JCPenney did a promotion with Firestone back in the day where you could get your car battery replaced for life. The intent of the promo was life of the car, ie 8-12 years, but the language really said “basically forever.” There are people to this day, decades later, still getting free battery replacements[1]. Hell, there are people who even hunt for the batteries and make good money when they find them in scrapyards. This promo turned into a perpetuity JCP did not want or intend to have on its books. That mistake went all the way to the top of the company and caused real change in how they did cross promos. I’m willing to bet this delta fiasco went to the CEO’s desk and the company addressed it, one way or another.

[1] https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/threads/jc-penney-lifet...

> So as an employer, if there's no ability to remove underperformers every year, you've turned employment into a market for lemons

You can fire someone, but not on a whim*. You need to build a file, build history, give chances for one to improve their behaviour and performance.

*in some cases you can, like grave errors, like ignoring safety regulations, endangering others, etc.

In (parts of -- often state-defined laws) the US it might or might not.

- Generally, you can be fired without any particular reason.

- Outside of a few whitelisted reasons (like being fired "for cause"), when fired, you can collect unemployment (a system where the employer self-insures, sending money into a governmental pool to payout in such cases) for O(1 yr), with caps in the $900/mo.range, depending on the state. Not clicking on the link would likely not count as "cause," but Twitter might try to argue it does (not that it necessarily matters since the severance package is probably better and probably precludes filing for unemployment).

- Other labor laws exist, like requiring some sort of notification period for mass layoffs. If this were found to be a mass layoff in disguise, there'd be additional penalties.

- Similarly with race or any of the things you can't fire a person for (e.g., if a person didn't see the email because they were pregnant and doing something medically relevant, a lawyer might be able to say something about the firing being structured in a way that discriminates against pregnant people, which is not legal).

- If the link had any attached terms and conditions, those likely would not be enforceable since the contract was agreed to under duress.

- Any other contracts between Twitter and the employees might matter. Perhaps the firing is allowed, but there are other constraints on the exact manner (e.g., having previously negotiated a better severance package).

- If the link had any specific terms involving lower pay or reduced benefits or whatnot, there's a decent chance that it was criminal extortion or blackmail in various parts of the US.

And so on. We can start tacking on hypotheticals which might apply, but I'll stop there.

> indentured servitude

There's no need to be so hyperbolic when bagging on the US. It's bad that we don't have great safety nets for people, but forcing individual employers to take up the slack isn't an ideal solution either (still no protections when the employer goes bankrupt or when a crisis hits somebody like a college student, and it disproportionately impacts the smallest businesses because you can't spread the risk out across a lot of employees and revenue -- an imperfect but almost strictly better solution is just raising the unemployment rates to match the real inflation we've seen), and it's nothing like indentured servitude which allows the working conditions to degrade nearly arbitrarily without a chance to leave and go someplace better.