Lawyer Up!

To celebrate my first week FUNemployment  here’s a a little thread of all I learned from my recent run in with Malaysia labour law. As a foreign employee I’m incredibly thankful these laws apply to me, but I can’t speak to whether there are some roles that won’t be covered. 

My boss fired me out of the blue in an unrecorded conf call, which I bailed on  immediately. I know from MY time as a manager you can’t  just do that. You can only get fired immediately for gross negligence, insubordination, or criminal activity like fraud. 

For performance related terminations there needs to be warning letters explaining the areas you are not meeting expectations, performance improvement plans and an opportunity to improve. 

My boss may have complained a lot but he NEVER provided official  warnings. He followed none of the process which is not surprising, as I’ve never had a performed review for him. 

It took HR A WEEK to come up with a reason for letting me go, and even then it was one *I* suggested while trying to negotiate a solution amicable to everyone. 

When they DID come up with a termination letter the reason was garbage and they attached a number of onerous requirements and tried to tie them to singing an  awful doc that tied my notice salary and severance, which are due under Malaysian law no matter what, to shutting up about the company forever

They wanted me in the office every day (my team is in 2 days a week), produce 5 pages of documentation a day (I drove the creation of all the documentation we had) and to write a daily status report. 

Seeing I was trying to help them out of a sticky situation (HR  knew they hadn’t a leg to stand on and had in fact told me that. 

My biggest concern was that they once they realised how badly they screed up they would try and to manufacture some ”evidence” of misbehaviour/insubordination during my notice period. I just did not want to deal with these people any more ( I had lodged an official HR complaint against the boss the day before he terminated me) 

This was when I reached out to friends asking about lawyers.

One firm sprung into action as soon as I talked to them.  I contacted them Friday, had a conf call EARLY Saturday morning and they had a plan in place for Monday morning.

Some lawyers might suggest planning to go to court from the off but these guys suggested trying to negotiate a settlement NOW. Going to the Industrial Relations Department (IRD) could take years through conciliation and going to Industrial Court.

The lawyers suggested a cap for the time they would spend and I would pay for and got to work making calls and drafting letters.  Our demands never really changed:

1. Plan a clean handover

 2. Put a plan in place for notice period pay and severance (no strings attached, they owe me this no matter what) and after a certain period i would handover all my stuff and be on annual leave from that point onwards 

My lawyers expected them to lawyer up and then the lawyers could thrash out the details. This never happened. I doubt they really consulted a lawyer at all (all my letters were headed with my laters details. Theirs were badly cut n paste monstrosities with mismatched fonts and numbering). 

In the end after multiple back and forths with my lawyers replying within hours, and my former HR replying in days if not weeks, we just told them we reject their offers and will lodge a claim with the industrial relation department the following day. 

Within hours they accepted our terms and a handover of all my company equipment was arranged for THE FOLLOWING DAY, no horrible contracts to be signed or anything!

I’m pretty sure they did not want the scrutiny on the company that a court case would bring but either because of my old boss’s vindictive personality or overconfidence/stupidity on HR’s part it took them three weeks to give me what we asked for. 

My biggest takeaways from all this:

1. Know your rights. There’s a lot online like https://legaladvice.com.my/unfair-dismissal/

2. Got a troublesome boss? Find a lawyer or law professional who can help. Just having a third party helped avoid getting into arguments with an already hostile boss

3. Get a lawyer who’s in tune with you. Mine knew it was better to get a negotiated settlement NOW rather than go to the labour court, which could take years.

You have 60 days to lodge a complaint with the industrial  Industrial Relations Department (IRD) so keep that in your back pocket. (see link above for details).

The lawyers weren’t cheap but out of my notice period salary it’s not too big a chunk & was WELL worth it for the peace of mind they delivered.  Now I can sit back and look for another job  & not have to worry as the company implodes around me, and imploding it most certainly is