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Employment Law: Nurse Manager's Position At Will, Court Says.
Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession
August 1997
Quick Summary: The employer had a four-step progressive-discipline policy for hourly nursing employees. Salaried management employees were "at-will" employees.
The law presumes employment is "at will" absent an agreement for a fixed duration, terminable at any time by either party with or without cause.
This presumption can be overcome. To overcome the presumption of at-will employment, there must be proof establishing that the employee was made aware of a written policy expressly limiting the employer’s right of termination.
To overcome the presumption of at-will employment there also must be proof that the employee made the decision to accept employment with the employer and turned down another option in reliance upon the fact the employer had a policy limiting its right of termination. NEW YORK SUPREME COURT, APPELLATE DIVISION, 1996.
The registered nurse in this case started with her employer as an hourly part-time utilization review coordinator. Her position became full-time and salaried seven years later.
Three years later the nurse added to her professional credentials a state license as a nursing home administrator. With this she was qualified and was able to secure promotion to the position of administrator of the hospital’s skilled nursing facility. However, shortly after achieving this position, in a dispute with top-level management, she was abruptly terminated from all ties with the hospital by the hospital’s chief executive officer.
The nurse sued for wrongful termination. Her case was dismissed by a lower court and this dismissal was affirmed by the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division.
The court ruled that the nurse’s belief was unfounded that she could be terminated only for just cause and only after a course of stepwise progressive discipline. The law, as a general proposition, states that employment is terminable at will by the employee or the employer, with or without cause, assuming there has not been an agreement of some sort which limits the employer’s rights.
In this case the hospital’s employee manual explicitly stated that progressive discipline and termination only for just cause applied only to hourly employees.
Salaried management-level employees could be terminated immediately, according to the employee manual, that is, without going through progressive discipline, and the manual explicitly stated that there was no express assurance that a management employee could be terminated only for just cause. The nurse did not believe the employer would abruptly terminate her, but her employer’s right to do so was, in the court’s opinion, part of the trade-off she accepted when she moved into management. Fieldhouse vs. Hospital, 649 N.Y.S. 2d 527 (N.Y. App., 1996).