Originally Posted by
Banzai
I do work in a zero tolerance workplace. USAF. I have to be familiar with this sort of thing as an officer. Your friend, in that situation, would have grounds to fight wrongful termination if he got an attorney. The issues of potential racism make that one sticky, but I would give him greater than 50/50 odds of winning that one.
Trust me, I know very well about zero tolerance...I've heard that phrase quite a bit. But zero tolerance does not mean "guilty until proven innocent". There is still a burden of proof, and what happens too often is that supervisors automatically lynch the accused out of fear of the accuser and the potential workplace time bomb they may represent.
Supervisor's need to keep their craniums screwed on straight and THINK about things, and in many of these outrageous cases the accused need to know their rights.
OK, but it's still an "at will" state. They can fire you because you caused them trouble, or because they didn't like the fact that you pulled into a parking spot at a 9 degree angle this morning, or for no reason at all. The only recourse you have is to collect unemployment.
Maybe the armed forces or other government organizations have recourse, but those of us in at-will states in private industry are always an eyeblink away from unemployment. Your defense against this is to be valuable to the organization. In this case, I suspect that nobody had ever called anyone on the "zero tolerance" thing. I also wouldn't be surprised if the policy got rewritten after he was gone. I have no way to know, I don't know anyone else who works there.