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Was I wrongfully terminated?

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leann carman

Junior Member
What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Iowa.
I was fired from my cashier/server job around the first of the new year. I had been working in a restaurant in the food court area of a mall for about 8 months. I was always dependable, on time for work and no complaints about my job performance were ever formally or informally made by my supervisor or coworkers . I would show up at a moments notice if I was called in on my day off. I am a single mother 25 years old, I need the money and I really needed the job so I wasn't about to do anything to mess it up. In the food court there is an adjoining restaurant next to ours. I will refer to it as restaurant 'B' and my former job as restaurant 'A'. Sometime in early December some of the employees at restaurant 'B' had made accusations that I and some of my coworkers had been giving away free food. These were false accusations motivated, I believe, by some jealousy issues that, for the sake of brevity, I will not go into. Around mid-december I was working at restaurant 'A' when the supervisor for restaurant 'B' came over to me and my coworker and demanded to speak with both of us immediately. He demanded to know which one of us had called the district manager (his boss) of restaurant 'B' and complained that the servers were giving away free food. We both denied it and I didn't know what he was talking about. This supervisor then threatened me by saying something bad may happen to me. Of course I was concerned about this threatening statement and I went back and told my supervisor and coworker about it. Both urged me to let mall security and police know about it. I notified mall security and a police officer was called. The officer went to the restaurant 'B' supervisor and asked him what had happened. I was not there but the officer came back and told me that the supervisor said he was sorry and apologized for what he said to me and the officer then told him to stay away from me. I thought the matter was over. But after the first of the year I was not on the work schedule anymore and I asked my supervisor why. She said I needed to talk to the restaurant 'A' owner. I called him and he told me that there had been complaints about me in the mall and that the police incident was bad for business. Now I have been told my one of my former coworkers at restaurant 'A' that it was actually my former supervisor who had sent a text message to the district manager of restaurant 'B' saying that her employees were giving away free food. She apparantly did this in retaliation for the false accusations that had been made against us by some of the employees at restaurant 'B'. I believe I am a victim caught in the middle of this problem created by my former supervisor and my firing was motivated by her desire to cover her own unwise actions by using me as her scapegoat.
 


cbg

I'm a Northern Girl
A wrongful termination means that you were fired for a reason that is prohibited by law. What law do you believe was violated? (I'm after something specific here - if you don't know the name or statute number of the law, something like, "is there a law that says I can't be fired because...." will do)
 

commentator

Senior Member
They can't do this to me, can they? Yep, 'fraid so. It's not against any law.

Your only alternative is to file for unemployment benefits while you are looking for another job. It won't be much money, and it will be a struggle to get it started because your former employer will probably contest it, but you can win it if they cannot show they had a good misconduct reason to terminate you.

In other words, filing for unemployment may give you some sense of justice, prove that they fired you without a good reason to do so, but otherwise, there's no law that says you can't be fired for any reason or no reason, just because the employer feels like it.
 

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