Not because they would lose a lawsuit but want to avoid one in the first place.

I get that... but when you get down to it, really, absolutely *anything* that they say other than "this employee was a good worker", especially if person calling about the reference actually asks a specific question pertaining to that, and the former employer provides what is essentially a non-sequitur answer that clearly reeks of wanting to avoid a lawsuit, which could certainly end up causing the person to not get hired, so the ex-employee could still try to sue them for saying stuff about the former employee that may have finalized the decision with the prospective employer to not hire them. The former employer can be just as damned if they do say something bad as damned if they don't say something good. They won't lose a court case, but would they lose, in court, if the previous employer just said that the employee didn't fit in with their company culture, or some such thing? After all, the employee isn't likely to know exactly what they said about them before filing a lawsuit... at most they would know only that something that they said led to the person not getting hired.

if it is corporate policy not to say anything beyond verifying dates of employment and possibly other facts such as title and last salary.

But that's not what you said. You said "We can only say positive things about the employee. I will therefore remain silent."

This is very different from "Our policy says that we cannot give any review of any employee's service"

While it may be difficult to get the new employer to say why they didn't hire you, there are plenty that will admit that it happened at the reference check.

If you can intentionally convey a message, it can be taken that way, and be used in court that way. A jury would certainly agree that it was meant as a negative review.

Specifics may be difficult to nail down, but financial harm would be easy enough to prove. Even worse, this doesn't even have the benefit of using truth as an absolute defense.

Realistically, if the employee was good I would say so, otherwise silence tells its own story.

And therein lies the problem. Silence then becomes a negative, and can open them up to a lawsuit.

More to the point, the very premise of providing a reference serves no purpose to the former employer, and is only done as a professional courtesy to the new employer. The status of the employee is meaningless to the old, so why risk a lawsuit when there is nothing to be gained?

Are there any explicit laws or precedents that indicate what specifically which data is safe for an employer to divulge that will not be considered incriminating to the character of the employee? I'd like references to them, if possible...

If a prospective employer of a former employee of yours calls and asks you what kind of worker they were and you retort with what is essentially a non-sequitur by saying that all you can give are the dates that they worked there, that's going to paint a pretty clear picture that if you say anything else about the employee, you feel like they might try and sue you, and that will still almost universally lead to them not hiring that person (employers tend to shy away from employees who might try and sue former employers for saying something that wasn't false).

They'll never pass up an opportunity to squeeze more money to fund pet projects back home. Hell, they're already talking about tapping the untouched potential of my 401(k).

If they call asking for dates of employment, then they wouldn't need to talk to me at all, they *should* be talking to HR, who will have those records, and for that matter, I probably wouldn't be able to precisely confirm the dates anyways, even if I knew the individual personally. If my hands were really totally tied by HR like that with unsatisfactory employees, I'd probably default to directing any calls about such employees directly to HR, telling the caller that I apologize for any inconvenience, but I'm not readily able to answer any inquiries about that person that HR would not also be able to answer with at least as much expediency. We would, in such a case, be talking about a person that I never gave any kind of permission to for other employers to ask me questions about, after all. If an ex-employee asks me for a reference and I don't feel they were a good employee, I'll tell them that I'm not going to serve as a reference for them, and if anyone calls me about them, I'll direct their calls to HR. With HR tying my hands like that, if HR can't answer their questions, then neither can I anyways.

You can't even do that here because the employees is entitled to getting a reference letter from you if he worked for you.

The only reason I can think of that an employer would ever even be willing to talk to the HR department at all is either if the former employee actually personally worked in HR, or else if the person that was given as a reference no longer worked there.

As a "former European" you should know how crazy it is to claim that Europe has some sort of common values. There are no "European values". There's a bunch of countries with different values who happens to be in a trade union together. It is only the politicians who have been lying about the EU and are trying to make it into United States of Europe who will claim we have a "united Europe" with the same values. Every single true European knows each country has it's own values.

If the law prevents him from saying anything bad, then certainly he could just say that the law prevents him from saying anything bad, and leave it at that.... The former boss hasn't said anything bad at all about the employee and has only expressed (completely truthfully) that the law in that jurisdiction prevents him from being able to do so, and advise the caller that they will have to form their own opinion.

clearly the money is nervous, or they would not have gone running to congress.