Fired for attendance in Michigan.

by Lana
(Detroit, MI)

I was recently fired for an attendance policy, that does not exist. There is no employee manual or attendance policy. The employer will allow Employee A to take off as much time as they want and will punish Employee B, for doing the exact same thing. There was no verbal warning, no written warning, and nothing signed when I was fired.

My personal belief is that I was fired because after a year of waiting, I had finally received my health benefits. The owner is a bully and consistently plays favorites with people in the place. One day you can be his punching bag and the next he will pick someone new. The owner also picks and choose which employees he will give health benefits to. Maybe 20 of the 125 employees have health benefits. The rest aren't even offered them.

My question is.. Will they be able to fight my unemployment?


Hi Lana,

They can fight. They often do. The question is can they fight it effectively. Just because an employer doesn't have rules doesn't mean a person can't be denied, but it does make it much more difficult.

If someone is always calling in with every excuse under the sun a case can be made to show that any reasonable person with half a brain .. knows that an employer expects consistent attendance and that their frivolous behavior caused harm to the employing unit in some way.

But, and this is a big but ... if a claimant can prove when documentation does not exist that the employer does not uniformly enforce even his own unwritten rules, then he will have a hard time proving good cause for the termination. Also where no documentation exist credibility is determined. Adjudicators and hearing officers both, hear about this stuff day in and day out and they develop excellent bullshit detectors.
Sounding credible should never be underestimated.

Structure is important in the workplace. Unemployment personnel that decides whether you get benefits or not like it and it is an important element in creating fairness in the workplace. If there's no written rules and an employer arbitrarily applies unwritten rules how can anyone who works for him know what to expect, which is the point. An employer's responsibility.....is to see to it that the employees know what to expect if they mess up, if they need to address a problem, if .. if ... if.

So you tell me Lana. What kind of case does your employer have.