is it legal for an employer to change policies without prior notification?

[ryan347]

I came into work today to be ambushed by a surprise change of attendance policies. My employer uses a point system, and when you get 10 occurrences you lose your job. Now the change they made was they decided to cut the max allowed occurrences down to half (5), without any prior notification. I am currently at 6.25. So before I had quite a bit of room, but now if I'm late once in the next 2 months i will lose my job. Which I also thought was extremely unfair, the points should be scaled to the same percentage. It seems like they are just trying to create reasons to fire a lot of people.

So my question is: is it legal for an employer to change policies that affect the conditions of employment without prior notification??

 

[cbg]

In this instance, yes, it is.

Get to work on time.

 

[theretoo]

Ask a local employment law attorney how the employer's attendance policy stands up to your state employment laws.

And yes, employer's do use attendance policies to discriminate against employees. It is fairly common actually.

 

[cbg]

What theretoo is not telling you is that most of what many people consider discrimination is perfectly legal.

Theretoo, name me a single state that has a law addressing attendance policies, and back it up with a link to the law. Not a law that might indirectly affect attendance in certain situations, but a law that specifically tells an employer what they may and may not have for an attendance policy.