Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ashelmire 2928 days ago
>He was fired. It doesn't matter that people didn't intend for him to be, he was, it went through the system, it was a done deal. Paying people not in your employ is fraud, even under the best of intentions.

There's basically a certainty that it was a violation of his contract and company policies that made it not legally sound. A company can also pay whoever it wants for any reason.
1 comments
krapp 2928 days ago
IANAL so I might be wrong, but if they terminated his contract, I would assume they can't still legally pay him as if they hadn't.

Of course, he's also well within his rights to sue over it.

link
girvo 2928 days ago
IANAL either, but I did get a Bachelor of Law; one thing that was hard for me to get while I was studying is that while I thought of the law & contracts as a series of instructions that get executed by the "CPU" (our legal system), really for the most part it's being executed by humans who really dislike cute "this then that, screw context" thinking. I would not be surprised at all if a judge would laugh at an employer that tried to make the argument that he was "terminated" due to a clerical error and automated systems, therefore they don't need to pay him...

But, it depends! It's never black and white for this stuff. It'd be an interesting case though, and I'm sure it's happened before!

link
krapp 2927 days ago
> I would not be surprised at all if a judge would laugh at an employer that tried to make the argument that he was "terminated" due to a clerical error and automated systems, therefore they don't need to pay him...

Yeah, judging from this thread and the negative scores on some of my comments, I was way off base about that.

link
madeofpalk 2928 days ago
He's a contractor, so can't he just submit an invoice and receive a payment? Or does 'contractor' mean something different in the US?

If he missed out on pay then it's because no one cared enough/someone didn't care enough to sort it out.

link
ashelmire 2926 days ago
"Contractor" in tech means, "we want you as an employee but we're too cheap to obey the laws involved or make a commitment, so here's a 3 year contract, hope this never goes to court!". Frankly, it's a way for companies to avoid the law, though California at least has recently made this an illegal sort of arrangement via new work rules.
link