Reply #4: Being screwed by your employer stories are so tragically common. Here's mine: [View All]

[Exiled in America]

Before I tell mine, I first want to express my sympathy that this has happened to you. I agree with the first responder who said that they are afraid you are going to sue and try to play hardball to scare you away. Even going to the effort to try and deny you unemployment is to make them "look" like you really were some kind of problem employee if you ever sue.

My story doesn't involve sexual harassment, but it was pretty devastating to me. I worked at a major high tech company for six years, only I was a contract employee. You know, the guys who do all the same work for less pay and less benefits. Hey, it was a job. Anyway, in my last five months I got transfered into a different department. I was the expert on site on a particular type of testing (QA) that was a pretty new approach, especially to this company. I had spent five years developing the processes, tools, documentation, presentations, doing trainings, selling the idea to new departments, etc.

When I got to this new area the manager there pushed me to continue to make a bunch of new documentation about the testing, and combine it with all of my existing documentation and store it on their servers, etc. When he felt that he had sucked all the possible information he could out of me, he went to our contract manager and ended our contract - put me out of work. Of course, part of our contract stipulates that everything you work on while contracted to this company becomes the property of the company. So he basically just used me to do all the work, then got rid of me so that he and his own people could take it all.

This is what I came to understand later. The week I was laid off, the manager in question came to me and said he was really sorry that this had to happen, but he just didn't see any future or value in the kind of work I was doing for his area. So I said to him, okay I'll go ahead and clean up all my stuff and get it out of your hair then. And he said that would be fine. Clearly he didn't think about what I was saying, and at that time I took him at face value.

So I removed all the files and things I had created from their server, but not before I made CD backups of all the information. So keep in mind, nothing was ever destroyed - just moved.

About a week later I got a call from my contract employer saying that they would not be bringing me back for any new assignments because this tech company was saying that I maliciously removed files before leaving as a kind of retaliation. They never checked with anyone to make sure that was true. The manager, who wanted me gone anyway, just filed the security report making the claim, and without ever talking to me, they flagged me as denied access to the site so that I could never work any job there ever again.

I tried to find out who I could talk to in order to appeal this. I tired to explain that no files were removed, they were all backed up and still there. But no one would listen. I found out later that basically any employee of this tech company can tell security to ban anyone from the site at any time and they barely investigate the incident - they just do it. And once they do it, they refuse to negotiate or investigate further, and there is no appeal process.

So about a year later I accepted a new job at this site, walked in on my first day to find out that I was denied access to the site. So I lost that job, and I can't ever work any job there again. All for being accused of something I didn't do. All because this manager was lying and simply wanted me gone so he could take all of my work.