Court Opinion

ID: 9730238
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 15:06:18.508777+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:03.205472
License: Public Domain

COMPTON, Acting P. J.—I dissent.
Absent some constitutionally permissible statute regulating an employer’s conduct, a private employer ought to be able to “run his own railroad” as he or she sees fit, and one of the most important factors in the success of any business is the effective selection of personnel.
For political and other reasons, most governmental employers have adopted a civil service system which generally controls the hiring and firing of employees. On the other hand, the private sector has, under our economic system, traditionally enjoyed a free hand in that area.
A private employer’s personnel decisions can, of course, be limited by a mutually negotiated collective bargaining agreement or a mutually negotiated agreement with a single individual specifying, inter alia, the length of the employment and the amount of compensation.
The suggestion in some recent court decisions that somehow a binding contract of employment can be “implied” by nothing more than satisfactory *672performance by the employee and praise and promotion by the employer stands traditional concepts on their heads and will discourage employers from praising or promoting employees for fear that in doing so they are locking themselves into a binding contract which neither party ever contemplated.
If a civil service concept is to be applied to the private sector, it is a matter for the Legislature under constitutional restraint and not for the courts.
Of course, if an employee, by the conduct and representations of the employer, is led to believe he or she has some form of job security and thus eschews other offers of employment or suffers some form of recognizable detrimental change of position, the doctrine of estoppel will serve to vindicate the wrong. Certainly, however, simply faithfully performing the job for which the employee is paid cannot be viewed as detrimental reliance. No estoppel is urged here.
In the case of a claimed “implied-in-fact” contract, the employee should at a minimum be required to satisfy a court as to just what the specific terms of that contract are. The questions that need to be answered are: (1) How long is the employment to last? Is it for a lifetime? Until a specified age? (2) What is the amount of compensation? Can the employee’s salary be cut for any reason? Are raises required? (3) In the future, can the employee be required to do a different type of work? Can the employee be transferred? Demoted?
Obviously, the simple assertion that the employee was “led to believe” that if he satisfactorily did the job he was paid to do, he could only be discharged for “cause” answers none of these questions.
The issue of what might constitute “good cause” is also troubling. It cannot be the law that a private employer must in each case submit the soundness or wisdom of what he or she considers to be good cause for termination to the determination of a jury. This, in effect, would turn the courts into a civil service commission for employees in the private sector.
In the case at bench we simply have a private university, which desires to maintain a competitive baseball program, removing a losing coach and replacing him with one that it thinks will be a winner. The correctness or wisdom of that decision does not strike me as a question which ought to be decided by a jury.
*673Finally, Civil Code section 33901 would prevent the court from requiring the employer to restore the employee to his original position. Thus, the only remedy available for breach of the so-called implied contract is money damages. I submit that the ascertainment of those damages, under the circumstances, if at all ascertainable, would be highly speculative.
Reduced to its simplest terms, this is merely an attempt by a discharged employee to obtain court ordered “severance pay.” Whether such severance pay is something which would be socially or economically desirable is a question for the Legislature, not the courts to answer. I would affirm the judgment.
Respondents’ petition for review by the Supreme Court was denied May 23, 1990.

Civil Code section 3390 provides: “The following obligations cannot be specifically enforced: 1. An obligation to render personal service; 2. An obligation to employ another in personal service.”