When has a fired employee suffered an illegal retaliatory discharge, and are there exceptions to such firing? If you’ve been fired by your employer, you might have a common law retaliatory discharge claim if you prove 1) you have, in fact, been actually fired; 2) in retaliation for your activities; and 3) the firing violates a clear mandate of public policy. Generally, common law retaliatory firing claims are available only to at-will employees — employees whose employment has a nonspecific duration that can be terminated at any time for no reason (other than illegal retaliation). Fixed-term employees are ones who have an agreement with the employer to work for a fixed amount of time (except under union collective-bargaining agreements — those fixed-term employees could have retaliatory discharge rights if those was negotiated in the contract). The policy is that with a contract for term, the employee is typically protected from willy-nilly firing anyway since the firing has to typically be for a specific cause. What might be a violation of a clear mandate of public policy? To determine what constitutes public policy, Illinois courts look to statutes and constitutional provisions that give rights to the public at-large (the right […]
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