Company cancelling the contract after almost an year

[Milan Jain]

Jurisdiction

Washington

Dear Forum Members,

I am from India and in March 2019, I received an offer from one of the reputed organization in the USA. At that time, I was doing an internship in that organization. The company offered me a position in March 2019 and asked me to join in July 2019. I accepted the offer. However, since then, they have been postponing my joining date because the project on which I was supposed to join, hasn't been finalised yet. I have been patiently waiting for the things to get settled, but now I am getting concerned that if I should I wait or not. I am losing on my savings. From the company side, I am also getting hints that if the project won't start, the company might retract the offer as well. I wasted almost an year on this company, I lost all my savings, and I think it is unfair. I accepted the offer and didn't apply anywhere else. I did nothing wrong but still paying a big cost. If anyone could provide me a legal advice on the same, I would highly appreciate that.

 

[Tax Counsel]

It's going to depend a lot on whether U.S. law applies to this or Indian law. It also matters if you have an actual contract that guarantees you employment for some specific period of time (e.g. one year, or whatever). The general rule in the U.S. is that jobs are at will, which means that either the employer or employee may terminate the employment relationship at any time. That means in this context that either of you could say at any time that you are terminating the relationship. So, in the U.S., unless you had an actual employment contract for a specific period of time the employer could simply continue to string you along until it knows if the project will go and if it doesn't it can just tell you that you aren't needed, terminate the job, and that's it. In the U.S. you'd have wanted to be working some other temporary job at the very least while waiting for this employer to get its act together. It's not the employer's problem that you have used up savings waiting for this job to start.

It might be different under Indian law, so if Indian law applies then maybe you have protection. I have no idea because I don't know Indian employment law at all and this site focuses on U.S. law. You might want to see an Indian lawyer who handles employment law to see if you might have some protection under Indian law for this.