I feel for ya Joe. I was fired from my job working for a plastics company of in late 2003 under rather contrived (but legal considering PA is a "right to work" state) circumstances. To make a long story short: worked in technical dept., new manager hired from outside of company who had no "real world" experience and no education relating to our product, and he decided he didn't want any technical employees who didn't have degrees. One individual with over 14 years was fired some months before me, I was left go in Dec. of 2003 after just over 10 years, and my best friend who had just about 10 years in was fired less than two months later. They had "excuses" for all of us...my friend managed to beat them in arbitration and win unemployment since he managed to prove, using their own witnesses that they brought to the arbitration, that the "falsification of company documents" he was fired for was a long established practice which was not only well known but literally approved by higher management some years previous. This seems to have possibly cause an issue which I'll get into later.

My yearly review, completed six days prior, rated me at 96% (my buddy rated 98% but his goals were more modest) and my supervisor called me that night and said he had not been informed of anything prior to the incident occurring and had no idea how he was going to handle the department without me. The guy who took my place was literally swamped when he took over as he had little to no idea what exactly it was I did other than our areas of overlap. Several projects literally had to be dropped and one project my buddy and I had worked on which was talked about as "the future of the company" literally petered out and has been shelved...they had to restructure the entire goal structure for the R&D department to what seems like a "maintenance" level from what had been an aggressive program of developing new products and moving into new markets. This occurred literally right at the point when several highly profitable products were nearly ready for production...but they fired the people who had done all of the R&D and testing and, unfortunately for them, they found out that newly minted college grads, even when provided complete and accurate documentation of formulation, testing, and evaluation, couldn't exhibit the ability to work with the company's proprietary products which can be highly unstable and unpredictable as well as a high school dropout with a GED (my buddy) and a college dropout (myself) who both had well above average IQ's (bordering genius level, although I don't really give that stuff much credence.)

Now it seems that she may be hampering our ability to attain new employment. But of us have had to resort to taking jobs (mine temporary) working in production environments at tasks well below our skills. Both of us have applied for better. Both have been to first, second, and even third interviews that seemed to go staggeringly well. Both have noticed that at the point where the process goes into evaluating our references, the phone seems to fall dead or the nearly anonymous "don't call us, we'll call you" rejection letter appears in the mailbox. That's where some info that I gained just last week comes into play.

It seems the HR manager, who had been with company just over a year when I was fired, sent out a memo to our supervisor and the individual who took my position (who assists the supervisor and operates in his stead when he is unavailable) which they had to sign stating that any requests for recommendations or evaluations coming in from prospective employees for either my friend or myself had to be directed to her and that ANY failure to do so would result in immediate termination. This occurred just after my buddy won his unemployment arbitration and as far as I know there isn't a single other employee whose recommendations are REQUIRED to come from anyone other than his supervisor. Frankly, I have a huge issue with my recommendation coming from an individual who sat in an office 75 yards away from me and other than some polite acknowledgments around the office and the termination meeting has only second hand knowledge of the other 9 years I worked for the company.

This is a woman who literally knows nothing about myself or my friend except basically the circumstances surrounding our termination. Personally, I was treated like a violent felon as they all but handcuffed me when having THREE PEOPLE escort me from the premises (I have no history of violence, never exhibited violence on the job, and didn't raise my voice our become angry in any way during the proceedings.) I was called up to the office to "pick up a package" and then asked to step into the HR office where she had six people from management, of whom only two had any reason to be there. Immediately as I exited the office they had our IT person literally enter my office and wipe my computer as they were convinced that I had some sort of "time bomb" software set up which would trash their system (not that I have any history of that either or ever talked about such things and ignoring the fact that abhor spammers, adware, malware, trojans, worms, and the mutant morons who perpetrate such crap.)

Literally, if you had asked me ten minutes before I was called up to that office, I would have told you that it was pretty likely I'd work for them for the rest of my career. Now it appears that I'm being black-balled by them for no good reason. My next move is that I need to find someone with a business to request a recommendation from them by fax so that I can find out what they are telling my employers about me. Anybody in a position to do that for me (and possibly my friend) would be a big help in me finding out (and stopping) what may be a situation that is currently trashing my career and my life.