Firings/Lay-Offs

People get fired and laid-off all the time, and although most terminations are unfortunate and upsetting, they are usually not illegal. This is because Colorado, like most states, is governed by the "at-will" employment doctrine. At-will basically means that employment can be terminated at any time, by either the employee or the employer, for any legally permissible reason. In practice, at-will employment provides employers with considerable power.

But at-will employees still have important legal rights. For the last few decades courts and legislatures have been subtly changing at-will employment to provide more protections for employees. Today, if an employee can prove that they were terminated for exercising a right protected by public policy, or in violation of an employment contract, they can establish a claim for wrongful termination.

The public policy exception to at-will employment means that an employee cannot be fired for exercising a legally protected right. Consider, for example, an unsafe workplace. By law, employees have the right to report employer safety violations to OSHA. So under the public policy exception to at-will employment, if an employee gets fired for reporting to OSHA, they have a claim for wrongful termination.

There are many other employee rights protected by law. A short list includes:

If you have been fired for exercising any of these rights, you may have the basis for a wrongful termination claim.

The other exception to at-will employment is employment contracts. Firing an employee in violation of a contract or agreement is illegal, and can form the basis for a successful lawsuit against the employer. And while most contracts are written and signed by the parties, there are also implied contracts which are created by the situations surrounding employment. For example, an employee handbook which includes termination procedures can create an implied contract that an employee will not be fired without those procedures being followed.