What counts as wrongful termination; research shows consumers like buying from the underdog

Wrongful dismissal; consumers like underdogs, too

DISPUTING DISMISSAL: What happens if you think you have been fired for a bad reason?

If you are a private-sector employee not under contract in the U.S., there are not many legal options to pursue unless you can prove a civil rights violation.

“Private-sector employees don’t have rights” in the U.S., said Charles Craver, a professor specializing in employment law at George Washington Law School. An employee can be fired for any reason.

For any legal reason, that is. Workers cannot be dismissed for being whistleblowers, and federal law prohibits employers from dismissing or discriminating against workers because of their sex, national origin, religion, race, color, age or disabilities, for example.

You can also sue an employer for violating an employment contract, and there are certain state-by-state definitions of wrongful termination.

But even a dismissal that would be illegal — because of one’s sex, say — can be hard to prove.

“The courts have cut back on wrongful termination cases,” said Steve Paskoff, president of HR consultancy ELI and a former attorney with the government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “You want to have ’smoking gun’ facts.”

Even if you do happen to press ahead with — and win — a lawsuit over losing a job, you might be better off settling for back pay and other damages rather than asking to be reinstated in your position.

There can be so much ill will following a legal battle that it would be better for both parties if the former employee didn’t return to the company, Paskoff said.

UNDERDOG THINGS: The underdog isn’t just a fan favorite in sports. Many consumers also prefer buying products from companies that market themselves as underdogs, according to a recent study.

“The use of underdog brand biographies can have a positive impact on consumers’ purchase intentions and actual choices,” according to the authors, Harvard University researcher Neeru Paharia, Harvard Business School professor Anat Keinan, Simmons School of Management professor Jill Avery and Boston College professor Juliet Schor. A company identifying itself as an underdog can help increase consumers’ brand loyalty, they said.

Their study showed that what gave a company an “underdog” appeal was achieving success despite having fewer resources than competitors and having a backstory of “passion and determination,” the researchers said, citing big technology companies that stress the “humble garages” where they were started, for example, or the label on Nantucket Nectars drinks, which say the founders started the juice company with “only a blender and a dream.”

Marketing matters, they say. It’s the consumer perception that the company is an underdog that allows him or her to identify with the product, rather than the reality of the marketplace, in which a corporation may be a dominant player.

In one test, the researchers gave college students the choice of two brands of chocolate, Scharffen Berger and Dagoba. An “underdog” corporate backstory was used interchangeably for the two brands. The students said they would choose the underdog brand 71 percent of the time, according to the study.

The authors ran tests on 1,400 survey takers in five separate studies. The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.