If you would like to fire an employee you may want to move ahead with it as quickly as possible. However, you need to realize that the employee might not take it well and might accuse you of doing it for the wrong reasons.
You are allowed to let most employees go when you want to, but some will have contracts that limit when you can do this. Those who don’t have specific contract clauses limiting when you can terminate them are subject to at-will employment law – i.e. you don’t need a reason to let them go. However, you need to be careful they don’t accuse you of doing it for an illegitimate reason. Here are two illegitimate reasons:
In retaliation for a protected activity
Maybe an employee has caused you problems because they have told the authorities that you were flaunting safety regulations or committing fraud against the state. Whether their allegations are accurate or not, you cannot fire them for making them.
Because of a protected characteristic
Maybe you have had to part company with several people of a particular nationality recently. They were all poor at their jobs and it’s just a coincidence that they all came from the same place.
One of them alleges you are doing it because of where they are from rather than the quality of their work. Nationality is one of the protected characteristics, alongside gender, disability and more, so if that allegation were proven true you could be in serious trouble.
If someone accuses you of something like this, you may want legal guidance to fight the allegations that you breached employment laws when letting them go.
