At-will employment: an idea whose time has gone?

Our local elite of hard-line propertarians revels in the idea of at-will employment. They like to gloat that the large business they own or the corporation where they're a highly-paid executive is in an at-will state (which the states around here apparently are). What this means - at least in this context - is that employers can fire anyone anytime they want to, even for no reason at all, and the employee has no remedy (unless the firing is otherwise prohibited under existing laws against discrimination or if the worker has a union contract that prevents the dismissal).

You can just feel these monied execs sticking their tongues out and placing their thumbs into their ears.

This has led to a revisionist pretense that this doctrine is simply common law that's been around since the Code of Hammurabi and can't be repealed. But actually it never appeared until a document by Horace Wood titled "Master And Servant" in the robber baron era of the late 19th century. The title of this treatise tells you everything you need to know about what at-will advocates thought of workers: They thought workers should be their slaves.

But the hero worship of at-will employment is pretty much limited to the U.S. and A. America is the only industrialized country in the world that has no nationwide safeguard against at-will termination. In many American locales, at-will seems to exist only because of the absence of a law, not because there's a law to establish this doctrine. Courts in these places have fashioned the at-will doctrine from Wood's treatise, not because there were any existing laws.

But there's a flip side to all of this: What about a worker's right to stop working for someone? Strictly speaking, at-will should also cover the employee's right to quit. Well, that side of the coin should have already been deemed to be protected by common law. The notion of at-will being used to protect employers rather than workers dashes job security to smithereens. Big Business's use of the at-will concept is asymmetrical and biased towards employers, and that's why we must encourage our state legislators to protect workers from unfair terminations.

The system must allow fired workers to sue - and to win if the firing was wrong. America can't afford to lag behind in workers' rights.

(Source: http://www.rbs2.com/atwill.htm)