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At Will Employment

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AT-WILL-EMPLOYMENT

Written By: Karla McCleskey

Submitted to : G. Alexander Weimer, Jr

LEG 500

January, 23, 2011

1

In the United States employees without a written employment contract can be fired “for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all”. This topic alone has been around since the nineteenth century, and has given employers unfettered power to dismiss their employees without being thereby guilty of a legal wrong. Many employees believe that great job performance will allow them to have job security, but the expectation that you could not get fired because of doing a “great job” has lost value and many of those “great” employees have found themselves laid off, and terminated without cause. Many ethical issues may arise when discussing employment at will, because if an employer fires an employer for no cause at all, critics will soon follow the employers behavior. There could also be many problems that come with employment-at-will, like the legal precedent, backlash of potential employees, and resentment from current employees. The book explains that the earliest adjustment to the right to work doctrine were made when workers fought for the right to organize and form labor unions. In 1935 the Supreme Court guaranteed these rights, and announced that employers could not intimidate their employees with the at-will-employment doctrine. Beginning in the 1960s, federal civil rights laws were created against those employers who fired employees because of their race, national origin, color, religion, sex, age, and disability. Also in 2002 Congress passes the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which protected so called “whistleblowers” that reported financial misconduct in publicly traded companies. In the case Adair v. United States it forbade workers from joining labor Unions . It made the “yellow-dog” contract illegal. In

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