For what reasons can I be fired?
Unless you have a written contract with your employer establishing a set number of years for your employment (for example, you are a football coach with a five-year employment contract), you can be fired for a host of traditional and obvious reasons: incompetence, excessive absences, violating certain laws or company rules or sleeping or taking drugs on the job. And you can also be fired or laid off because of company downsizing due to a downturn in revenue, reexamination of the company's mission, a merger with another company or transferring work to a factory in a lower wage area. In most cases, an employer does not need to provide any notice before giving an employee walking papers.
Still, there are limits. Employers do not have the right to discriminate against you illegally or to violate state or federal laws, such as those controlling wages and hours (the law is a fair wage for hours worked). Most state discrimination laws are quite broad. In addition to protecting against the traditional forms of discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin and age, many also protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation, physical and mental disability, marital status and receiving public funds. -- all boiling down to the fact that an employer must deal with you fairly and honestly.
No law requires an employer to provide severance pay. Nevertheless, many employers offer one or two months' salary to employees who are laid off. A few are more generous to long-term employees, giving perhaps one month's pay for every year an employee worked for the company.
An employer may be legally obligated to give you severance pay if you were promised it, as evidenced by:
a written contract stating that severance will be paid
a promise, in an employee handbook, of severance pay
a long history of the company paying severance to other employees in your position, or an oral promise to pay you severance -- although you may run into difficulties proving the promise existed.
<A HREF="http://www.nolo.com/encyclopedia/articles/emp/LoseLeav.html" TARGET="_blank">http://www.nolo.com/encyclopedia/articles/emp/LoseLeav.html</A>
The above was copied from this site, which has an encyclopedia of US Labor Laws.
You are terribly misinformed about our laws. The area of law that the unions of airlines here fight their cases in the courts is under CONTRACT LAW not LABOR LAW. I am certain Hong Kong has contract laws. But do not think for one minute there is a law here that will keep our jobs for us, and even these laws do not guarantee us continued employment.
If we are not in a union, we walk out without any legal protection when we walk to make our conditions better. Union workers walk out with the only recourse being their contracts and that does not always guarantee them any assurance of continued employment.
Ask some of those air traffic controllers that went on strike a few years ago and the government said bye bye.
I hope this sheds some light to your thoughts thatwe here don't know what it is like to face a company and have no protection. We DO NOT HAVE SUCH PROTECTIONS. You are not being discriminated against, you are not being sexually harassed, you are not being biased becuase of race, creed or sex, so just where do you see that our laws would be more protective of your issue? You are paid handsomely for the work you do. Your hours fit to the standards of the CAA and FAA besides the COS. Your arguments are only to improve your conditions not that you are not getting any, so please stop this waffle about here in the USA we are so protected in our jobs. We can be fired at any time for any reason and 9 times out of 10 that is it there is no where to go. And there is no law that protects us when we decide to take on an employer to improve conditions. unless of course you are working in the coal mines and black lung is a threat or some other seriously hazardous area like nuclear power plant employees but those conditions you do not have. Sorry but you hit a nerve.