This topic has been brought up in my friends circle and its seems a legal reason to sue your employer
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Promissory estoppel is a fairly narrow legal method for enforcing a promise that was detrimentally relied upon, even in the absence of a more explicit contract. If someone promised you something, reneges, and you lost something as a result of that, you might have a claim.
The context I see it brought up in employment most frequently is someone backing out of a job offer. Let’s say you apply for a job out of state and they agree to hire you but do not provide relocation assistance as part of your job offer. You find an apartment in your new city, rent a moving van, and relocate. You’re ready to start your new job on Monday! Friday afternoon comes and they tell you that they’ve offered the job to someone else instead. Even though you never worked for them, and may have never signed any paperwork at all, you relied upon their job offer and uprooted your life, spending a significant amount of money. You can absolutely sue them in this situation.
It’s a very tricky and fairly limited means suing someone. It would be used in cases where you have a non-binding “agreement” and one party makes a decision that creates a loss or puts them at a disadvantage and then the other part renegs on their agreement. It really hinges the “reasonability” of the promise and the action taken that results in a loss.
For example, if a company promises me a job, so I quit my current job, sell my house, fly across the country to the new office location and they say “oh, we changed our mind, sorry”. In that I have taken a loss based on a promise that wasn’t delivered upon. In that case though, I’d have a hard time arguing in a court that moving cross country was a “Reasonable” action to take without even a written offer-letter.
A better example might be if a store promises me they will refund any clothes I buy that don’t fit, so I buy the clothes and take them home and they don’t fit and the store says “sorry, no refunds”.
In practice promissory estoppel isn’t a big thing because of that reasonability clause, for the little dumb things where it’s legit, it’s not worth litigating, for the big things that are huge, it wasn’t reasonable for the person to take the loss without getting something in writing first.
EDIT –
The best example in the case of an employer would be something like I find a new job that pays more and put in my notice. My boss says if I stay she’ll better the pay increase so I decide to stay with the company. When my next check comes nothing’s different and now my boss says never mind, she couldn’t get the pay raise approved, sorry. In that case I now have a loss (the lost earnings and opportunity I could have had) and this would be grounds for promissory estoppel. But again it’s not a great scenario because it’s not usually a great idea to sue the company you work for, plus the questionable reasonability of making employment decisions without having something in writing.
Simply:
Someone promised that they would hire you for A.
So you turned down valuable opportunity B and C and move across the country.
Then A says, nvm don’t want you.
You sue for lost value of B or C, and cost to move.
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