Court Opinion

ID: 9519352
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 01:14:50.001103+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:44:18.621926
License: Public Domain

PRESIDING JUSTICE MILLS, dissenting: I am simply unwilling to force an employer to weigh the costs of a lawsuit when coming to its decision to discharge an employee who admittedly refuses to follow the commands of a superior. Employer here filed an affidavit in support of its motion for summary judgment which recited that the employee was discharged because he refused to follow the orders of an immediate superior. Plaintiff unabashedly agrees that he refused, but offers up various excuses which, in his opinion, should excuse his refusal. He then recalls a two-year-old matter which he feels was the real reason for his discharge. This scenario parallels the facts in Cunningham v. Addressograph Multigraph Corp. (1980), 87 Ill. App. 3d 396, 409 N.E.2d 89. There, we found that one factor favoring the granting of summary judgment for a defendant employer was the employee’s admission that he had violated a company policy, which violation had precipitated his discharge. The majority seeks to distinguish Cunningham in that the company policy there was written and well known. In my view, it begs credulity to imagine that the policy of obeying the commands of superiors is not well known to anyone who has ever been in the work force as a lower-level employee. Further, it begs common knowledge of the everyday operations of businesses to imagine that such a policy would not ordinarily be enforced if it were not committed to writing. The second factor cited by us in Cunningham was that an employee is incompetent to aver the motivation behind his discharge, absent a specific admission concerning the motivation by the employer. Here, the majority would hold that the employee’s alleged cooperation with law enforcement authorities two years before his discharge automatically raises the possibility that his eventual discharge was retaliatory. The practical result — which I note was foreseen by Justice Underwood in his dissent from the majority in Kelsay v. Motorola, Inc. (1978), 74 Ill. 2d 172, 190, 384 N.E.2d 353, 361 (Underwood, J., dissenting) — is that the employee has, by virtue of his alleged cooperation with authorities, become virtually “fireproof” in that he may not be dismissed by the company without the threat of a lawsuit and the concomitant costs and dead weight loss of resources. I dissent.