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Brent Blanchard, Lawyer
Category: Employment Law
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Experience: Twelve years of experience in employment law matters, representing both employees and employers.
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Advised I have 24 hours to accept a demotion with 40% pay cut.

Resolved Question:

Advised I have 24 hours to accept a demotion with 40% pay cut. Salary will equal my starting salary from 14-1/2 years ago.

Submitted: 12 months ago.
Category: Employment Law
Expert:  Brent Blanchard replied 12 months ago.

Thank you for your question.

Sorry to hear about what prompts it.

What does your written employment contract say??? Don't have one? If there is no contract, the employer can do anything he or she or it wants any day, for any reason or for no reason. If there is a verbal employment contract, the problem is always proving what who said when.

What do the written policies and procedures say??? Sometimes even without an employment contract, *significant* and unfair departure from internal practices *might* support a wrongful termination claim if it goes to getting fired, or a "constructive termination" case, perhaps with some prohibited discrimination element, if there is some way conditions were made so intolerable that any reasonable person would quit rather than put up with the nonsense.

The word "demotion" makes it sound like the question includes some "for cause" allegations. Those can get tricky, because often the employer can make a good case for demotion as a merciful alternative to outright termination. Employers usually have to seriously botch up the documentation of what was allegedly done wrong for a "for cause" termination (or demotion) case. "Pretext" is used to describe those made-up excuses to jump or demote a worker who is really being discriminated against. When the worker in question does not "look like" the managers and/or the rest of the workforce, the longer the employee has been working with ZERO record of bad behavior, the stronger the "pretext" case will be.

Under these circumstances an in-person consultation with an attorney who can review your case file would be a very, very good idea. That would be the best way to find out whether there would be any high-percentage of success claims to pursue. There is no substitute for reviewing the facts AND documents in a confidential setting.

Thank you.

BAB.
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Brent Blanchard, Lawyer
Category: Employment Law
Positive Feedback: 97.4 %
Satisfied Customers: 1878
Experience: Twelve years of experience in employment law matters, representing both employees and employers.
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