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Documentation Failures in Employment Termination Claims
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In March 2023, Harbour Ridge Construction Ltd., a mid-sized commercial contractor based in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador, terminated a 54-year-old site superintendent without cause after 11 years of service. The employee had earned $142,000 annually plus a company vehicle, health benefits, and an annual performance bonus averaging $18,000. No written severance offer accompanied the termination letter.

The company's risk manager now faces a familiar problem: assessing potential exposure with almost no documented information beyond tenure and the absence of alleged cause. Determining reasonable notice requires the Bardal factors—position seniority, age, service length, and local re-employment prospects—yet the personnel file contains no job description, no performance reviews, and no record of the termination meeting itself. The Corner Brook construction labour market, the employee's specialized certifications, and any mitigation efforts remain unknown. Without this foundation, quantifying the claim exposure or evaluating settlement options is guesswork.

Harbour Ridge Construction's Personnel File Gaps and Their Operational Origins

When the general manager of Harbour Ridge Construction Ltd. opened the personnel file for the company's longest-serving site superintendent in early March 2023, she expected to find the documentation that any mid-sized commercial contractor operating in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador would maintain for an employee earning $142,000 in annual salary plus an average annual bonus of $18,000. Instead, she found a file that told almost no coherent story about 11 years of service. The original employment letter from 2012 was present, as was a single performance review from 2015, but the intervening years were represented by nothing more than payroll change notices and a scattering of safety certifications. There were no documented performance conversations, no record of the verbal warnings that the operations director insisted had been delivered, no written account of the project reassignments that management characterized as disciplinary, and no contemporaneous notes explaining why a 54-year-old superintendent who had once been trusted with the company's largest projects was now being considered for termination. The file's silence was not the product of a deliberate decision to avoid creating records; it was the accumulated residue of operational pressures, management transitions, and informal workplace norms that had never been examined until the company found itself needing documentation it did not possess.

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