Employment at Will



Employment At Will

Introduction

During recent years, the principle and practice of employment-at-will have been under attack. While progress has been made in eroding the practice, the principle still governs the philosophical assumptions underlying employment practices in the United States, and, indeed, employment at will has been promulgated as one of the ways to address economic ills in other countries (Blanpain, Bison-Rapp, Corbett, Josephs & Zimmer, 2007). This paper will briefly review the major critiques of employment at will. Given the failure of these arguments to erode the underpinnings of employment at will, we shall suggest new avenues for approaching employment issues to achieve the desirable goal of employee dignity and respect.

Discussion

Employment at will means that an employee can be terminated at any time without any reason. It also means that an employee can quit without reason. Employers are not required to provide notice when terminating an at-will employee (Budd, 2004).

Origins

The at-will rule has its genesis in a rule in Horace Gray Wood's 1877 treatise on master-servant relations. Wood cited four U.S. cases as authority for his rules that when a hiring was indefinite; the burden of proof was on the servant to prove that an indefinite employment term was for one year. In Toussaint v. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Michigan, the Court noted that "Wood's rule was quickly cited as authority for another proposition. (Blanpain, Bison-Rapp, Corbett, Josephs & Zimmer, 2007)"

Some courts saw the rule as requiring the employee to prove an express contract for a definite term in order to maintain an action based on termination of the employment. Thus was born the U.S. at-will employment rule, which allowed discharge for no reason (DelPo & Guerin, 2011). This rule was adopted by all U.S. states. In 1959 the first judicial exception to the at-will rule was created by one of the California Courts of Appeal. Later, in a 1980 landmark case involving ARCO, the Supreme Court of California endorsed the rule first articulated by the Court of Appeal. The resulting actions by employees are now known in California as Tameny actions for wrongful termination in violation of public policy (American Bar Association, 2011).

Employee Rights

Employees do have rights when their job is terminated, including contract rights, company policy, and statutory rights provided by federal and state law. There is information available on employee rights that will help employees understand what they are entitled to and to get assistance if they believe they have been discriminated against (DelPo & Guerin, 2011). Several statutory and judge-made exceptions to the doctrine exist, especially if unlawful discrimination is involved regarding the termination of an employee. These restrictions have been controversial; an empirical study in 1992 by the RAND Corporation showed that imposing exceptions to at-will employment resulted in a long-term drop in aggregate employment of two to five percent (Budd, 2004).

Employment at Will Doctrine

There are many theories concerning the inception of the at-will doctrine. Some feel that the doctrine of at-will employment first appeared as a statement in a legal treatise by Horace ...