Raleigh, North Carolina employment attorney Kathryn Abernethy helps explain what you should do if you and your coworkers are presented with severance packages. Severance packages can be more complicated documents than what they perceive to be at first. With decades of experience in The Triangle, this is part of a series with attorney Abernethy regarding North Carolina employment law. For more of this series, click here. You may also read the transcript of her video below.
Transcript: My Coworkers and I Were All Given Severance Packages What Should We Do Before We Sign?
Unfortunately, layoffs, particularly mass layoffs, are often masks for discrimination, and the standard courts apply to layoff situations are much more lenient on the employer. This makes it much harder to prove that the employer is engaged in intentional discrimination.
That said, what evidence do you have that is more than just while I was part of this class and I was laid off?
What evidence do you have otherwise that maybe a group was targeted, and it could be something as simple as comments by the decision makers at around the time that the decision was made.
It could be that there’s a financial incentive in particular for a company to get rid of, for example, older employees who are close to retirement.
You know, look at, what do you have beyond just the fact that you’re in a particular class and you were terminated?
And, and ask yourself, what additional indicators are there here that shows that they were targeting this particular group? And sometimes it’s as stark as the statistics.
So, for example, you know, if everybody who got let go was female or they only let go of black women, for example, you know that that that’s going to then start to look a certain way to a court about the validity of that layoff.
But most companies are a little bit smarter than that.
They’ll throw in a few younger people and men, and particularly if they’ve got any underperformers that are that are in non-protected classes, they’ll throw those folks in as well to try and muddy the waters and make it look like they are not in fact laying off all of the middle-aged women.
