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Having just this year had to squeeze two maliciously incompetent employees out of my department, I have a new and deep appreciation for at-will employment. Like most of our worst laws, we have at-will employment because the worst 5% of the population ruins it for everyone.
Anecdote: The unionized civil-engineering office in which I worked had a complement of around half a dozen surveyors. Most of them were industrious, but one was lazy and a troublemaker.
The survey coordinator (engineer in charge of the surveyors) had to constantly check on this surveyor to make sure that she was actually doing her assigned work in an industrious manner.
One of my engineer coworkers warned me that I should never trust this surveyor because the surveyor once told the coworker that getting in a minor crash with an office car was an easy way to get out of work.
After the survey coordinator gave her a bad performance review, she filed an HR complaint accusing him of threatening her with violence during the performance review's closed-door face-to-face meeting. It was totally frivolous, since the boss of the office was in the same meeting and could vouch for the survey coordinator's innocence! But the investigation still dragged on for many months. IIRC, I once overheard the survey coordinator discussing with the office boss how the surveyor's union-assigned lawyer would even commiserate over the phone with the survey coordinator about how the surveyor couldn't even keep her story straight.
She had a reputation for treating her two subordinate surveyors poorly. I wasn't too aware of the details, but I overheard the survey coordinator discussing with the office boss how he would look out the office window into the parking lot and see her subordinate surveyors running to the survey van in order to avoid being late.
Once I even overheard her loudly joke in the office's coffee area, "I like my coffee like I like my men—hot and black", which I as a nigger easily could have reported her to HR for (and maybe should have).
She was finally forced to resign (not even fired!) when, during the pandemic, she coughed into her hand and intentionally used the same hand to smack one of her subordinate surveyors on the back, after which the subordinate (who IIRC had a wife with a compromised immune system of some kind) filed an HR complaint and threatened to report her assault to the police on top of that.
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