I'm not an attorney, but from the conversation I had with my attorney ... a lot of companies have company policies. That's where notice and so forth comes from. Their policies may say that you have to have three warnings and notice -- but the company required by law to follow their own policies. The policies are more like guidelines than actual rules. But they are developed by employee satisfaction research and are designed to prevent expensive lawsuits.

Often corporations circumvent their own policies. They'll find ways to give an employee bad reviews to justify firing them, even if they're doing a good job. The bad review is really a warning, "We're going to find a way to get rid of you, so start looking."

What you're supposed to do is find another job and save them the trouble of firing you. Then you show up telling people about this excellent opportunity, you can't pass it up, they pat you on the back and throw you a goodbye party. A polite fiction is maintained.

If people don't get the message then things get really ugly. The employment law attorney had encountered some really crazy stuff. People were deliberately overloaded with work so they'd do poorly and get a bad review; being moved to a department where they have no expertise; reducing their job responsibilities to almost nil and then writing them up for doing nothing; involving customers who are also personal friends in elaborate schemes to create a customer service issue, forcing the employee to handle things beyond their pay grade and then using that to fire them; suddenly cracking down on "issues" that hadn't been an issue before they elected to fire that employee.

Sometimes the effort in circumventing company policy creates abusive situations. That's where the attorneys get involved.

The only people in America who have any kind of job security are union employees.