Employers often believe that having a troubled or troubling employee resign from employment is a panacea to avoid litigation. As such, employers often propose that, instead of terminating an employee or providing him or her corrective action, they will simply ask the employee to resign. This only works, however, if there is absolute certainty that the employee will "take the bait" and actually resign. If the employee balks, the employer has created an additional layer of problems for itself.
One of the pitfalls of the "why don’t you resign" approach was discussed in the recent U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit decision, Burton v. Teleflex, __ F.3d __, 2013 US App. LEXIS 3538 (3d Cir. Feb. 20, 2013).
