wrongfully terminated

hi my name is john Mendez and I work in NYC for a company called watermatic coolers. today I went to work and I was terminated .I asked why and they gave a lame excuse that I wasn't productive enough and that's a big lie poor excuse they gave me. I have been there almost hitting a year and have never had any problems at all . I always did whatever jobs were assigned to me so this excuse was lame. they were paying me 15.00 an hour turns out they have someone to replace me for 10.00 an hour so that's the real reason for my termination. the fact that I was the only Spanish person on the tech team could also be the problem cause I was replaced with a white person . the company had done some things that me and my co workers were not happy with. like we install water coolers that's our job. they were paying us 15.00 for each install we did and 7.50 for uninstall's and 7.50 for service calls .then without warning the stopped paying us for all service calls and all uninstall's . they couldn't even tell us what they did till we figured out that we weren't getting paid for it anymore. when we brang it to there attention they said that they never paid us for that but of course we had proof and presented it to them and the just brushed us off. so I don't know if there's anything I can do at this point but if I was gonna get terminated I would have wanted there to be a good reason for it.

1 answer  |  asked May 13, 2008 11:03 AM [EST]  |  applies to New York

Answers (1)

Joseph Heppt
Employee at Will

Unfortunately, the law in New York is clear that an employer can terminate an employee for any reason or no reason at all as long as that reason is not discriminatory. In order to defeat a claim of discriminartion, the employer needs to show a valid business reason for the termination. In the facts as you describe them, while you might have a claim for discrimination, the employer's business reason was to replace you with less expensive worker.

posted by Joseph Heppt  |  May 13, 2008 11:13 AM [EST]

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