I've been the victom of a bad reference without my knowledge. Luckily, it was localized to one company, I was applying for. The person who gave me the bad reference was a former co-worker who was let go for performance reasons and decided to retaliate. This was fifteen years ago. Thank God, I have not had to deal with any bad ones since then. There does need to be a method of appeals or damage control, such as the way you can have erronious information corrected on a credit report.

What if you are a supervisor that had to make a bunch of layoffs to save the people you were able to keep?

There are just so many places where this could be very harmful.