West Virginia, like most other states, has an at-will employment law. Workers have the right to leave a job with little or no notice to their employer. They can also potentially lose their job without any advance warning. Some employees face termination due to performance issues or personality clashes with management. Other times, workers who feel they have succeeded at their jobs can end up terminated as part of a large-scale reduction in workforce.
Companies facing financial hardship or pressure from shareholders to increase profit margins may engage in workforce reductions. Widespread layoffs often mean that dozens of workers lose their jobs all at once. Most of the time, at-will employment rules allow West Virginia employers to lay off workers as they see fit. However, layoffs can sometimes constitute wrongful termination.
Layoffs can be retaliatory or discriminatory
Sometimes, the leadership at an organization decides to include one specific worker in a layoff because of their prior conduct. They attempted to unionize their co-workers or reported harassment from a supervisor. While those actions technically have protection under federal law, the company may want to get rid of a worker who might cause problems for the organization later. By including them in a large-scale layoff, the organization can effectively obfuscate what was clearly a retaliatory firing.
Other times, the company may not have targeted one worker in particular but rather an entire group of employees. Sometimes every worker who doesn’t belong to a certain church gets laid off at once. Other times, no one belonging to a certain race loses their job. When there are signs that the company considered protected characteristics such as age, sex, race, religion or disability status when laying off workers, the termination of certain employees may be discriminatory.
While companies can terminate workers for almost any reason or no explicit reason in West Virginia, they cannot terminate workers for illegal reasons. If a worker believes that the timing indicates a layoff was retaliatory, it might be a wrongful termination. The same is true in scenarios where workers see a trend regarding who got let go and who gets to keep their jobs.
Fighting back against wrongful termination can potentially lead to financial compensation for affected workers. Companies can also learn a very expensive lesson about violating employment statutes when workers take legal action.