Everything in the States is a lawsuit when it comes to getting rid of non-productive employees. Managers are taught to stop managing and dedicate manweeks of their time and many gig's of storage to extremely specific documentation of an employee's shortcoming and then wait for the recommendation to go through the approval processes at HR, Legal and finally the company Human Capital Director. In that time a business component can suffer an unrecoverable loss of morale amongst the productive team members as overall productivity loss will spread beyond the original source of the problem.
Many in Senior Management will advise line managers as follows:
"You can do all that paperwork or you can overspend your labor pool budget by one Full Time Equivalent before the end of the fiscal year and have to lay someone off. I won't mention it in your review."
There are all kinds of laws which were well intendedly enacted to protect good, hard working employees from unfair treatment but as often happens with these kinds of laws, every body BUT the good, hard working employee uses them to their advantage.....it's called "working the system".....so businesses adapt.
At the end of the day businesses will hire who they want to and get rid of who they want to, promote who they want to and assign bonuses as they see fit regardless of the laws. Every labor law has dozens of exceptions and loopholes. That's why there are so many lawyers in the field and very few of the cases actually ever go to trial. It's: "I'm not culpable, you're not culpable, take this check and sign the non-disclosure agreement".
Quite frankly, I like the Dominican way better: "If an employee makes me money, I'm keeping them". That whole separation pay thing should be rethunk tho...
