A formal review just covers the company's ass if you come back and claim that your firing was due to illegal discrimination. That is, afaik, 100% of the reason why PIPs even exist. They've decided they wan't fire you and now they need to assemble some compelling documentation that it's you, not them.

A much bigger reason is to demoralize you and convince you that you deserve to be fired, so you won't even think about a lawsuit.

PIPs aren't really good documentation of bad performance; in fact, a badly-written PIP can actually backfire on the company because the wording is usually full of holes a good lawyer can drive a truck through. Basically instead of the company having proof you were a poor performer, you now have proof the company is lying to get you out the door.

A PIP is a lawsuit deterrent, not an actual legal defense.

Not that I like anti-discrimination or wrongful termination laws anyway, though I am willing to compromise. I suggest a compromise to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws, where workers are actually commodities that are measureable and interchangeable.

That's a pretty silly distinction. Why should one's job title determine whether or not they can be discriminated against?

It has to do with how the lawsuits work. It would still be wrong regardless of whether it was actually illegal.

Yet, you've stated you don't want to allow certain people to file these lawsuits, which are usually the only way of trying to correct the problem. So tell me, why is it ok to deprive some people of this remedy simply because of their job title?

> where workers are actually commodities that are measureable and interchangeable

If you work for someone else, I have bad news for you ...

Apparently they do, in larger companies. It's an expensive, and time-consuming process, and large companies generally don't do those things company-wide without a good reason.†

† The reason may not be immediately evident of course. But when you unwind the bureaucratic logic, ultimately there's almost always a reason behind these phenomena.

You're absolutely right. In fact, the formal review process - even though it seems terrible - is actually giving you plenty of time to find another job.