I can’t give more approval for this woman, she handled everything so well.
The backstory is that Cloudflare overhired and wanted to reduce headcount, rightsize, whatever terrible HR wording you choose. Instead of admitting that this was a layoff, which would grant her things like severance and unemployment - they tried to tell her that her performance was lacking.
And for most of us (myself included) we would angrily accept it and trash the company online. Not her, she goes directly against them. It of course doesn’t go anywhere because HR is a bunch of robots with no emotions that just parrot what papa company tells them to, but she still says what all of us wish we did.
(Warning, if you’ve ever been laid off this is a bit enraging and can bring up some feelings)
I respect her speaking up for herself, but once a company has decided to let you go there is no amount of talking you can do to convince them to change their mind.
She knows that, she just wants them to admit it’s not her. As someone who has been in that seat, there’s being laid off, and then there’s people telling you you are incompetent. It’s a vastly different experience. By not proving to her that they knew she was a bad employee they said more about their company and culture.
It is likely that firing her for ‘performance issues’ costs the company less than just firing her for whatever the actual reason would be.
She’s not trying to do that—the corporate asshats are trying to blame this as a performance related firing as opposed to a layoff (which it was) which means she’s not entitled to the same severance and unemployment benefits. If she can get them to slip and admit that she has a legal case.
She’s not trying to talk her way out of getting laid off. She’s forcing them to justify it as a firing, instead of calling it a layoff. Because if you get fired with cause, you don’t get unemployment insurance. But if you get laid off without cause, you get unemployment. If she can get them to slip and admit that there’s not a reason for her layoff, then she can take that to the unemployment appeal and prove she deserves to claim insurance.
It could also affect her going forwards, because it determines whether or not she’s able to use her manager/coworkers as a reference in the future. If a future employer calls her manager and asks “would you hire this employee again” and she was fired for underperformance, the answer will be “no”. But if she was laid off without cause despite hitting all of her metrics, the answer will be “yes”. So it’s advocating for her future employment prospects, by not allowing the company to falsely blame her performance for the firing.
At least in Massachusetts this is entirely incorrect. Have had friends fired for cause, zero issues collecting unemployment.
And zero chance anyone would EVER say anything about job performance of a fired employee. You will get date of hire, and date of separation anything else opens them up for a lawsuit.
For what it’s worth, in most cases, “with cause” is misunderstood. “Fired with cause” on UI’s end typically means the employee was fired for something egregious and/or illegal. Stealing company property, committing fraud using company resources, gross negligence leading to someone getting injured, etc… Simple underperformance isn’t typically enough to exclude you from claiming UI.
Even though people will colloquially say that being let go for underperformance is “with cause”. It’s typically not correct, and won’t hold water if the former employee decides to appeal the initial UI denial. But companies have a vested interest in supporting that colloquialism, because if people believe they don’t deserve UI then they won’t try to claim it, (or won’t try to appeal it when their initial claim is denied,) which keeps companies’ UI payments low.
Mass has a lot of employee protections that other states dont but this is also really company dependant. Some big companies also dont fight unemployment claims, ever. I was HR at both a large and small company. The small company fought everything the large company had a policy of never fighting an HR claim no matter how egregious the firing cause. They felt it wasn’t Wirth the cost of defending a potential suit. So this is heavily dependent on state and company. Sometimes also on the HR, I always tried to find a way not to contest but other HRs may not have put that much work into pushing back if they were told to contest it.
Also references are often just dates of hire and title in most companies. But that’s totally separate from unemployment reaching out to HR Unemployment has a series of official questions you have to answer and one of them is “are you contesting this claim”. You’re friends companies may just be saying “no”.
Cloudflare wanted to pretend their layoffs were performance related firings. Depending on your employment contract, a person who loses their job as part of a layoff may be owed severance, bonus payments, or additional benefits and services. Someone who is fired for poor performance is not owed those things.
