- 16 -
termination without cause). We believe that Millipore took
petitioner’s claims seriously, particularly those in Massachusetts.3
The manner in which Millipore terminated petitioner potentially
could be considered tortious. The nature of petitioner’s
relationship to the company and the details concerning the
termination of his employment were highly personal. Publishing the
general distribution memorandum globally (which falsely indicated
that petitioner was dissatisfied with his job and had resigned)
without petitioner’s consent, to 5,000 employees of a Fortune 500
company on the morning of petitioner’s firing, could be deemed a
tactic by Millipore to force petitioner to leave quickly and
3 Possible causes of action in Massachusetts included:
(1) Invasion of privacy; disclosure of private facts about an
employee to other employees is a tort under the Right of Privacy
Act, Mass. Gen. Laws, ch. 214, sec. 1B (1984); Bratt v. IBM
Corp., 467 N.E.2d 126, 135-136 (Mass. 1984) (test for determining
whether communication of personal information about an employee
by an employer violates the statutory right of privacy requires a
balancing of the “employer’s legitimate business interest in
obtaining and publishing the information against the
substantiality of the intrusion on the employee’s privacy
resulting from the disclosure”); disclosure of private
information about an employee to other employees constitutes
sufficient publication to maintain a libel action, see Bander v.
Metropolitan Life Ins. Co., 47 N.E.2d 595 (Mass. 1943); (2)
defamation pursuant to Mass. Gen. Laws, ch. 231, sec. 92 (1986);
if a plaintiff shows that a defendant in an action for libel
acted with malice in making a defamatory statement, the plaintiff
may recover even if the statement is true, see Shaari v. Harvard
Student Agencies, Inc., 691 N.E. 2d 925, 927 (Mass. 1998);
damages for defamation and libel include mental suffering, harm
to reputation and standing in the community, mental anguish, and
personal humiliation; (3) negligent and intentional infliction of
emotional distress caused by the manner and effect of discharge,
see Agis v. Howard Johnson Co., 355 N.E.2d 315 (Mass. 1976); (4)
unfair termination; and (5) negligent firing.
Page: Previous 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 NextLast modified: May 25, 2011