On the firing line.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: North Carolina employment at-will doctrine

ON THE FIRING LINE

After Leon McLaughlin wiped off his face, he picked up the phone and called the Charlotte office of BarclaysAmerican/Financial.

It was a tough situation. As branch manager, he didn't have the authority to fire the collections manager who was giving him a hard time, so he documented each and every offense. Finally, when the employee threw a cup of hot coffee on him, he sat back and waited for BarclaysAmerican to send this problem packing. "It took them two weeks to come and talk to me about it."

His big boss in Charlotte didn't do anything other than tell him to continue documenting infractions. McLaughlin, who had been working for BarclaysAmerican 14 years when he took over the Statesville office, was flabbergasted. In his four years there, he says, outstanding loans had doubled to more than $3 million.

Two months later, on April 16, the collections manager finally got himself - and McLaughlin - fired.

McLaughlin had called him in to review his performance yet again. Things got hot. McLaughlin told him to get out of his office. He refused. "I got up from my desk to leave," McLaughlin says, "because it was just going the same place it always did before, and as I approached my door, he hit me in the chest."

McLaughlin threw up his right hand - a reflex action, he says - and knocked the man's glasses off. "He said, `I got you now, buddy,'" McLaughlin remembers. He called the cops and charged McLaughlin with assault. McLaughlin called it self-defense, and a district court judge agreed with him.

That didn't stop BarclaysAmerican from firing them both five days after the incident.

McLaughlin, now an assistant manager with Capitol Credit in Hickory, went to a lawyer and got the first of many lectures on North Carolina's employment-at-will doctrine. Winning a wrongful-discharge suit, the lawyer told him, was a real long shot. McLaughlin said he didn't care.

"We denied most of the allegations," says Terence G. Vane Jr., executive vice president and general counsel for BarclaysAmericanCorporation, "and asserted that the plaintiff was terminated for good reason." Citing the employment-at-will doctrine, the finance company asked the judge to dismiss the action. A Superior Court judge did just that at the first hearing. The state Court of Appeals and Supreme Court refused to override him.

But not necessarily because they thought the boss was right: BarclaysAmerican "displayed virtual indifference to [McLaughlin's] repeated requests...