Did I Get Fired for Asking for a Raise?

Dear Stanley,
I was fired from my job because I asked for a performance raise. Is that legal, and if not what is my recourse against this employer?
Canned in Skokie

Dear Skokie,

You are deluded, which is possibly why you were canned. Of course, there are other reasons, the economy and business in general being what they are. But your situational dementia certainly didn't help you any.

There may have been a bunch of different reasons why you were dis-employed at this time, but asking for a raise was not one of them. I don't have to know you, or know your boss, to know that this is true. It is my belief, formed over 127 years in corporate life, that nobody was ever fired for asking for a raise. On the other hand, many, many people have been fired because they don't know what's going on. You seem to be one of those. So my advice to you, offered in all humility, is to get a reading on the world around you, Bud. Because your grasp of reality needs a workout.

Blink twice. Open your eyes. And really see. Ugh. Ugly, huh? You bet it is. That's the real world out there. And only people who come to grips with it get raises or, more importantly, stay employed.

I once had an assistant. She wasn't working out. I liked her very much, she was smart and sweet and pretty capable at the essentials. She just had this annoying habit of talking on the phone with her mother about six hours a day, disappearing for two hours at lunchtime, and crying a lot when she thought nobody was looking. While this qualified her to be one of my family members, it made her a really lousy assistant. At the time, we were also engaging in another one of those quarterly cutback exercises that corporations have been going through since about 1932. It's a wonder anybody is still employed at all, when you think how long we've been firing people.

At any rate, the day came when it was time for me to fire Barbara. At 10 a.m., she poked her head into my office. "Could I see you for a minute?" she said. I told her yes, of course. She sat down. "I think I've been doing a great job around here and I really think I deserve a raise," she said, looking staunch. I was flummoxed. What a crazy world-view the woman was walking around with! I had told her repeatedly that her performance was disappointing. I had been kind about it, and obviously she hadn't gotten the message one bit.

I had to tell her, of course. You can imagine how surprised she was. I'm sure she went home that afternoon convinced -- as you are, Skokie -- that her request for a raise had something to do with her exit. Of course it didn't. But it must have been a more comforting story line than the truth: She was bad at her job and, in difficult circumstances, was an easy decision point.

You're going to get another job. Try to zoom in on a little more realism when you do. Certainly don't sue your old company for letting you go. They just might tell the world their opinion of why they did so, and you might not like what you hear.