Wrongful Termination

What is the name of your state? Arkansas - i was with a national trucking company as an over the road driver, hire date 9/6/00. in may of 01 i was told i would need a hysterectomy done due to severe bleeding and that it would be done in june of 01. i called my employer to inform them of this and was told that i did not have any sick or medical leave to take this time off. i explained to my employer that i understood this and did not mind taking the time without pay. i was informed at that time that i would have to resign my position as a driver and when i was released from the doctor that i could reapply for employment. i told them i did not want to resign my position that i only wanted to stay employeed and would come back to work after the doctor released me, but i was informed that i could not do that, that i had to resign my position that they could not keep me on their books. needless to say i resigned my position. at that time i did not know that i might have been wrongfully terminated, but have had several people tell me to check it out to find out. have i been wrongfully terminated? and can i file suit or has time run out?

Because you had not yet worked there 12 months, you were not entitled to leave under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act. Unless your State has it's own version of the FMLA (which is possible) that would require your employer to provide leave time to employees who had not yet worked for them for a year (which is doubtful), you were not entitled to leave.

Unless your employer has a voluntary leave policy that provides leave time for ee's with under 12 months of service and they violated it because of your gender, race, age, etc., then your employer did nothing wrong.

the employer can actually make you resign your position, even if when you medical condition requires you to take leave? my medical condition caused me to be anemic and the doctor said it had to be taken care of immediately, i thought you could not be fired or terminated for any medical reason?

In any case, the fact that you resigned removes ANY claims for 'wrongful termination'. If you had refused to resign and they did in fact terminate you, that might make a case (unlikely, as correctly noted by Beth), but your resignation removes any claim.

Softwhisper, whether you resigned or were terminated is really irrelevant. The underlying issue is that you were not legally ENTITLED to any leave, no matter what your medical condition was. You seem to be assuming that because you had a legitimate health problem (which is not in dispute) the employer had to offer you leave time. While that would have been nice, that just wasn't the case.

If the employer gave you the option of "resign or be fired" that is an involuntary separation from a legal prospective but that is not actionable in and of itself. There must have been some underlying wrongful act on the part of the employer to make this a wrongful termination.

One benefit of having resgined is that as you apply for new positions, you can honestly say you resigned to take care of a health situation rather than you were fired. It's semantics of course but being able to say you resigned puts a more positive spin on it.