Re:Nordstrom's 75-word employee handbook
by tptacek on Monday October 25, 2010 @09:03PM
(#1832402)
No law says you need to have an employee handbook, but there are a variety of spurious claims terminated employees can make (from harassment to discrimination and so on), and if you're called to the mat, any reason you had for terminating that person should ideally be traceable back to an employee handbook (including the company disciplinary process, so you can give an employee a "warning" and have that mean something afterwards).
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Also depends on the degree to which your state has "at will" employment.
The situation is probably much worse if you're in Montana, where there's a statute that makes employers liable for wrongful discharge.
Meanwhile, in the majority of US states, at-will employment is subject to "implied contracts", meaning that one very important purpose of an employee handbook is to eliminate any "implied contract" that a terminated employee could claim to exist.