Getting fired from a company is never a good experience, but when you lose your job due to no fault of your own, it can be especially painful.

What would you do if you were working for a company for several years and then they fired you with no offer of severance or other compensation?

That is what happened to the guy in this story, so he looked into the relevant laws and knew he had to take action. The company was based in America, but he worked in Canada, so he sued the company using Canadian laws. After a lot of hard work, he managed to get them to pay out the severance that they owed.

When a company operates in a country, they need to really understand the laws that apply to it, not just the ones in the home country. Read through the full story here, and see if you think this guy got what he deserved.

My American former employer didn’t pay severance when they fired me because they thought at-will employment is legal in Canada. It’s not. I sued them and they paid the bare minimum after partially defaulting.

In most places in Canada, while your employer can fire you for any non-discriminatory reason or no reason, they have to pay you severance unless you did bad things on purpose.

Canada has a parallel system: Employment Standards Act statutory minimum severance (as the minimum amount you will get) and wrongful dismissal lawsuit (common law reasonable notice, which can be much longer).

For some comparisons, I worked for 8 years. Under employment standards, I would be eligible for 16 weeks pay. Under common law, it could be 8 months to a year.

What was the reason they gave for firing this guy?

My employer was American in California.

I am a visually impaired and autistic Canadian in Ontario who cannot drive (it is relevant in the lawsuit even though disability discrimination is not alleged and cannot be proven, because courts know that disabled people have difficulty finding jobs and give larger wrongful dismissal judgements when plaintiffs can prove it. In my case, I have to work remotely).

I was fired after 8 years and they paid nothing.

I sued in Toronto small claims court and served them in Glendale, tried serving in Toronto, and then served by email, and finally, served in Vancouver.

This company seems shady.

I digitally stalked them across the North American continent in 2 provinces and another country, filing a lawsuit on my own with the help of AI and Google.

Serving them was difficult because they lied on their business documents, saying they have an office in Toronto when the office was occupied by Amazon (not my former employer).

If they paid the minimum required, what more is he entitled to?

But eventually, my persistence paid off.

They realized that they broke the law and paid 16 weeks, the bare minimum that they should have paid right along with my last wages and PTO.

I am not giving up. I will continue to fight for the rest of the money I am rightfully entitled to.

The past 4 months since my firing had been filled with uncertainty, but I am glad that the Internet and LLMs exist, even though these very same LLMs were probably the reason why I am unemployed, as I was an interpreter, and LLMs are really good at interpretation and translation of languages spoken/used by many people (in this case, Chinese languages).

Losing a job is always disheartening, and the company should try to do right by its employees. At a minimum, they have to follow the severance laws of the country, which it seems this company didn’t do.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who just let clients complain after her boss refused to approve overtime.

Read on to see what the people in the comments think of this story.

He might be entitled to even more than he thought.

Always fight for your rights, it is worth it in the end.

Company owners need to know the laws everywhere they operate.

This is good to know.

He got what he was owed.

The company thought it could get away with firing this guy with no compensation, but he proved them wrong. While employment law often goes too far and hurts companies, this guy was fired through no fault of his own. He deserves to be taken care of.

This is especially true because he worked at the company for quite a few years and then was let go with little to no warning. How is he supposed to transition to a different role in so little time?

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman whose HR department advised her to quit if she was that unhappy, so she did and found herself in a role reversal years later.