Minnesota Gives You Fifteen Working Days to Demand the Reason You Were Fired — and the Duty Never Arises Unless You Ask in Writing

Two sentences, two clocks

Minn. Stat. § 181.933, subd. 1, is the whole of the right:

An employee who has been involuntarily terminated may, within 15 working days following such termination, request in writing that the employer inform the employee of the reason for the termination. Within ten working days following receipt of such request, an employer shall inform the terminated employee in writing of the truthful reason for the termination.

Read it as a sequence rather than a rule. The first sentence is permissive — the employee may request. The second is mandatory — the employer shall inform. Nothing in the section obliges an employer to say anything to anyone until the first sentence has been used, and the first sentence closes 15 working days after the termination.

Every operative word

“Involuntarily terminated.” The subject of the section is the employee “who has been involuntarily terminated.” It does not reach a resignation. Whether a particular separation was involuntary is a question of fact the statute does not answer, and this page does not answer it either.

“Within 15 working days following such termination.” The clock starts at the termination, not at the last day of pay, not at the end of a severance period, and not at the exhaustion of an internal appeal. In Ganguli v. University of Minnesota, 512 N.W.2d 918, 923 n.2 (Minn. Ct. App. 1994), a professor argued that the University’s decision was not final until its president accepted the determination of an internal committee — and the court answered, in a footnote, that she “does not claim that at that point, she made the required request under section 181.933.” The question of when the clock starts on a decision subject to internal review was raised and not decided.

“Request in writing.” Both directions are in writing. The statute prescribes no form, no magic words, and no dollar figure. What it does require is a writing, and Ganguli is the reported consequence of not having one. The court gave two grounds: “There is no evidence that Ganguli made a written request that the University inform her of the reason for her termination. Therefore, she cannot claim that the University erred by failing to respond to such request,” and, separately, that the issue “was not raised in Ganguli’s complaint to the Judicial Committee.” Id. at 923. Note the currency: Ganguli quoted the version then in force, which gave five working days to request and five to answer. The section has been amended once since — Laws 2001, ch. 95, § 1, per the revisor’s History line — and the figures are now 15 and ten.

“The truthful reason.” The Legislature did not require a reason. It required the truthful reason, and the adjective is the operative one. A letter that recites a reason the employer knows to be false does not comply with the sentence as written.

“An employer.” There is no small-business exemption. Section 181.931, subd. 3, defines “employer” for §§ 181.931 to 181.935 as “any person having one or more employees in Minnesota and includes the state and any political subdivision of the state.” Subdivision 2 defines “employee” as “a person who performs services for hire in Minnesota for an employer” and adds that “[e]mployee does not include an independent contractor.” A worker classified as a contractor is outside the section — which makes classification, not the letter, the first question in some cases.

“Working days” is a term the Legislature used and did not define

Both figures are in working days, which is a longer stretch of calendar than 15 and ten calendar days. How much longer is not answered by the statute.

Section 181.931 defines eight terms for this group of sections — employee, employer, fraud, good faith, misuse, penalize, personal gain, and report — and “working day” is not among them. Chapter 645, which supplies definitions and construction rules for the statutes generally, defines “holiday” at § 645.44, subd. 5, and “month” and “year” at subd. 13; it does not define “working day.” The general computation rule is § 645.15:

Where the performance or doing of any act, duty, matter, payment, or thing is ordered or directed, and the period of time or duration for the performance or doing thereof is prescribed and fixed by law, the time, except as otherwise provided in sections 645.13 and 645.14, shall be computed so as to exclude the first and include the last day of the prescribed or fixed period or duration of time. When the last day of the period falls on Saturday, Sunday, or a legal holiday, that day shall be omitted from the computation.

Section 645.15 addresses which day is the first and what happens when the last day is a weekend or holiday. It does not convert a count of working days into a count of calendar days, and it does not say whose working days are counted — the employer’s, the employee’s, or the state’s. A search of Minnesota appellate decisions on CourtListener turns up none construing “working days” in § 181.933. The statute is silent on the point and this page does not fill the silence; what the text does settle is that neither period is a calendar-day period.

Subdivision 2, in full, and what it does not cover

The section is a trade. The employee gets the reason in writing; the employer gets to write it without buying a defamation case from that employee. Subdivision 2:

No communication of the statement furnished by the employer to the employee under subdivision 1 may be made the subject of any action for libel, slander, or defamation by the employee against the employer.

Four limits sit inside that sentence, and all four are in the text rather than in interpretation. The protected item is the statement furnished under subdivision 1 — not the employer’s statements generally. The protected communication is that statement’s communication, not the underlying decision. The barred proceeding is an action for libel, slander, or defamation, named as three torts rather than as a category. And the barred plaintiff is the employee, suing the employer.

What subdivision 2 does not say is as load-bearing as what it says. It says nothing about admissibility; a bar on one cause of action is not an evidentiary rule. It says nothing about the lawfulness of the discharge, which is governed by other statutes entirely. And it says nothing about what the employer tells anyone other than the employee.

Two Minnesota Court of Appeals decisions have applied the subdivision, and both confirm that it does the narrow work the sentence describes. In Robinson v. Amos, No. A23-0882 (Minn. Ct. App. June 10, 2024), an employee asked for the reason for his termination, was told he “was his own business and left the employment because of lack of work,” and sued for defamation on that answer. The court held that “section 181.933 does not provide a basis for a defamation claim,” and that because the employee “asked respondents for the reason he was terminated ‘in accordance with Minn. Stat. § 181.933,’ he cannot bring an action for defamation based on respondents’ answer.” Slip op. at 18, 19–20. Robinson is nonprecedential; under Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c), nonprecedential opinions “are not binding authority except as law of the case, res judicata or collateral estoppel, but … may be cited as persuasive authority.” The published decision runs the other way and is the more useful one: in LeBaron v. Minnesota Board of Public Defense, 499 N.W.2d 39, 42 (Minn. Ct. App. 1993), an employer argued that § 181.933 gave it an absolute privilege to publish a termination letter, and the court answered that “[b]ecause both parties admit they failed to follow the timing requirements of Minn. Stat. § 181.933, no absolute privilege can flow from that statute to protect the employer from liability for defamation.” An employer that ignores the deadlines does not get the section’s protection either.

What the letter is worth, and what it is not

What the letter is: a dated writing, produced on a statutory deadline, in which the employer commits to a reason it is required by statute to state truthfully. That is the entire value, and it is a documentary value. Reasons stated later — in an unemployment hearing, in an agency position statement, in a summary-judgment affidavit — can be compared against it.

What the letter is not: a finding, an admission of liability, or a legal conclusion about anything. Section 181.933 does not make the stated reason binding on the employer in another proceeding, does not shift any burden of proof, and does not create a claim if the reason turns out to be wrong. The section confers a right to receive a document. It does not tell you what a court will do with it.

If the request goes unanswered

The enforcement architecture for this cluster of statutes is narrower than the drafting of § 181.933 suggests, and reading § 181.935 closely is the only way to see it.

The companion section is administrative rather than remedial. Section 181.934, in its entirety: “The Department of Labor and Industry shall promulgate rules for notification of employees by employers of an employee’s rights under sections 181.931 to 181.935.” That is a rulemaking directive addressed to an agency, not a right addressed to an employee.

References are governed by a different statute, pointing the other way

Section 181.933 controls what the employer says to the employee. Minn. Stat. § 181.967 controls what the employer says about the employee to “a prospective employer or employment agency,” and it is built to limit liability rather than to create a right. Subdivision 2:

No action may be maintained against an employer by an employee or former employee for the disclosure of information listed in subdivisions 3 to 5 about the employee to a prospective employer or employment agency as provided under this section, unless the employee or former employee demonstrates by clear and convincing evidence that:

(1) the information was false and defamatory; and

(2) the employer knew or should have known the information was false and acted with malicious intent to injure the current or former employee.

Both elements, at the clear-and-convincing level. Subdivision 6(b) carves out one category: “This section does not apply to an action involving an alleged violation of chapter 363 or other statute.” The Human Rights Act is codified at chapter 363A; the posted text of § 181.967 reads “chapter 363,” and the revisor’s Table 2 records no amendment to the section since its enactment by Laws 2004, ch. 137, § 3.

What this page does not do

This page describes a document and the two deadlines attached to it. It does not evaluate a termination, and the letter does not either — whether a discharge was unlawful is decided under other statutes and is a separate question. Pairing a § 181.933 request with a personnel-record request puts two employer-generated documents side by side, which is a description of what the statutes permit, not a recommendation about your situation.