My question involves labor and employment law for the state of: Tennessee
Two weeks ago I was fired from my job of 4 years for unsatisfactory job performance. I worked at a large manufacturing corporation as a production supervisor with 70 people reporting to me. There was no actual misconduct and I have been approved to receive unemployment benefits.
About a year ago, I had one of my employees report to HR that I had discriminated against him about his job placement on the production line. HR investigated and found no merit to his claim. This happens from time to time and usually there is no disciplinary action taken against the supervisors for employee's complaints if there is no fault found with the supervisor. However, after this my manager started in on me about every one of my employee's complaints whether it was related to me or not. He said that it did not matter whether I was at fault or not; I just gave the perception of intimidation.
I am blind in one eye and my bad eye will wander, especially when I am tired. I told my manager that maybe the "perception of intimidation" was due to my bad eye - I do feel that sometimes people look at me differently because of it.
I will be 50 years old next month and I have 25 years of production supervisory experience. I have never been fired from a job before and I am very upset and embarrassed over this. All my performance evaluations have been good except for my last mid-year review which had a "needs to improve" in employee relations. I have had several emails from the plant manager over the past 4 years about what a good job I was doing. I have felt for the last six months that my job was in jeopardy; I have worked very hard to maintain good supervisor/employee relations lately and as a result, I have had no employee complaints in this time period.
The day that I was fired my manager and the HR guy that was in the room with us told me that they knew that I was a hard worker and that there was was no poor performance - no real details were given for my termination, just the "intimidation perception" and they also told me I just did not fit into their future plans.
My job was posted the same day I was fired. So I have two questions - is there any discrimination due to my eye? My second question is if they hire someone for my job that already works there that is much younger than me is this age discrimination?
Thanks in advance for your time.

