Target is not an insurance company. Your argument is outside the bounds of the situation.
I strongly disagree. When companies are sued, the company shares the cost of legal defense with the insurance carrier because in 99.99% of cases. The number-one reason big companies will NOT volunteer up-front to pay claimants anything is because of their obligations to their insurance carrier. The insurance carrier ultimately pays for the pre-trial settlement OR, in the statistically rare cases which go to trial, the court ordered judgment. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE INSURANCE MONEY!
You have a scale, on one side you have PR, on the other you have the team-member. The scale always tips to the PR side because to a major corporation, the value of PR is much higher than that of a single employee, regardless of the employee.
Not "always". An aggrieved employee who successfully gets the ear of major news media, or whose story ultimately "goes viral" in social media, can cause enormous PR damage to the company. You are underestimating the risk to the company of bad publicity. Think about how a few seriously aggrieved employees at Wells Fargo ultimately got the fake-accounts scandal covered in the Los Angeles Times, followed by investigation and findings by the Consumer Financial Protection agency, and the enormous negative publicity, legal and regulatory punishment Wells Fargo has taken since then. The 24/7 media news cycle and enormous power of social media have made it far riskier for a company from a PR perspective to exterminate (that was not a typo) an employee than in the past.
The cost of replacing an employee is quantifiable - the sunk cost of a terminated employee is essentially the cost to onboard them..... The cost of repairing PR is not inherently quantifiable - this represents a much larger risk...........The risk of negative PR in this situation calls for pre-emptive risk mitigation, and that mitigation is removing the source of the potential risk. It's really that simple.
Read above.
You and I may disagree on which is the more serious risk. The insurance carrier might well take a very, very dim view of a company which terminates an employee for a bona fide accident, due to the secondary liability which the company may face via employment law litigation and compliance with whistleblower complaints to State and Federal workplace safety regulators, labor regulators, and extremely negative coverage on news media and social media. And if the company fires an employee who is considered in a "protected class", what happens when some very public adversarial figure like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Alexandra Occasio-Cortes or Bernie Sanders goes public on the employee's behalf and really put's the company's management on the fire with
TOXIC negative PR. How's this going to affect Target's stock price, Wall Street scuttlebutt, and (cough, cough) insurance carriers, who might even issue a "Reservation of Rights" when the company reports a claim issue.
