Why do American workers tolerate 'At-Will' employment?

[Jimmy Higgins]

It is ridiculous that employees can quit whenever they want for whatever reason.

Yeah... and then to be charged $20,000 by your employee for doing so (Ohio Charter school teacher). Or to not be allowed to work elsewhere in the same field for 12 to 24 months (Jimmy Johns Subs), or be allowed to work for a company but not be an employee and have to pay all of the payroll taxes yourself (self-employed contractors).

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Companies in a position to hire but unsure of their long-term need for such people often hire temps.

Some places are hiring temps for longish term employment. It is becoming a very bad habit of companies, but it is much cheaper to do! Granted, the final product may not be as good and it isn't really a sustainable business plan, but fuck... we had a good quarter so what the fuck, right?!

 

[Togo]

True. I've quit a lot more companies than have quit me.

My experience has been the reverse.

 

[Bronzeage]

That depends on the position of the employee and size of the company. I have seen small businesses take a nosedive when they lost a key executive/manager (usually an active owner who sells their stake and moves on), eventually causing other people to lose their jobs as a result of the downturn.

Sure, there are always exceptions; but they are, well, exceptional.

As a general rule, it is the employee who typically has the most to lose, often by a very large margin.

And as the article quoted in the OP suggests, a major reason why employees tolerate 'At-Will' employment is that they falsely believe that they have legal recourse if they are unjustly dismissed.

The main reason people accept "at will employment" is because a flawed system which functions is preferred to an ideal system which doesn't.

At will employment keeps the relationship between employee and employer within the group. It's well contained. A different system might have more protection for the worker, but who makes the decisions? There has to be a new set of rules, and rule enforcers come with the deal. Our Civil Service system is about as close as we have ever come. It's an added expense to the cost of operating government, but since government departments don't have profits which can be used to measure performance and efficiency, something was needed.

No one said life was fair. A promise of fairness is often extended in order to keep people cooperating, but it's more of a general guideline, than a hard and fast rule.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Since most people do not understand At-Will employment, I doubt they have weighed its detriments and benefits against other employment schemes and then reasoned their way into accepting the least evil one.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

But it is ridiculous to consider an employee to be an an equal footing with his employer in this regard (which is the implicit assumption in 'At-will' employment).

True. I've quit a lot more companies than have quit me.

Depends on if I am a rat deserting the ship before it sinks.

 

[dismal]

True. I've quit a lot more companies than have quit me.

My experience has been the reverse.

Well, we can look at aggregated data if you like:

There were 2.7 million quits in June, little changed from May. The quits rate in June remained
unchanged at 1.9 percent. The number of quits was little changed for total private and government over
the month. The quits level was little changed in all industries and in all four regions in June. (See table
4.)

There were 1.8 million layoffs and discharges in June, about the same as in May. The layoffs and
discharges rate was 1.3 percent. The number of layoffs and discharges was little changed over the month
for total private and government, and in all four regions. (See table 5.) Seasonally adjusted estimates of
layoffs and discharges are not available for individual industries.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/jolts.pdf

And this is supposed to be a crappy job market, right?.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Because they simply cannot believe that it could possibly be allowed to be as awful as it actually is.

According to Pauline Kim, a professor at Washington University Law School, people tend to make inferences about the law based on what they know about more informal social norms. This frequently leads them to misunderstand their rights—and in areas like employment law, to wildly overestimate them. In 1997, Kim presented roughly 300 residents of Buffalo, New York, with a series of morally abhorrent workplace scenarios—for example, an employee is fired for reporting that a co-worker has been stealing from the company—that were nonetheless legal under the state’s “at-will” employment regime. Eighty to 90 percent of the Buffalonians incorrectly identified each of these distasteful scenarios as illegal, revealing how little they understood about how much freedom employers actually enjoy to fire employees. (Why does this matter? Legal scholars had long defended “at-will” employment rules on the grounds that employees consent to them in droves without seeking better terms of employment. What Kim showed was that employees seldom understand what they’re consenting to.)

(Source).

This is just one example, from an article by David Dunning, of erroneous confidence; there is a thread to discuss the major theme of the article here.

It seems that even people whose employment is 'At-will' do not understand just how few rights they have as an employee, until and unless they are capriciously or wrongfully dismissed - leading to their toleration and even support of a system that they would neither tolerate nor support if they understood it.

At will means you don't even have to give any notice at all? That seems pretty nuts if so. I can understand not forcing employers to give severance pay, but they don't even have to give notice? Really? That'd be nuts.

 

[laughing dog]

It is ridiculous that employees can quit whenever they want for whatever reason.

Yes, because indentured servitude or slavery is a much better social model for the labor market.

My guess is the US workers accept "at will" because they either don't know any better or believe they have little choice in the matter.

 

[nightwyrm]

It is ridiculous that employees can quit whenever they want for whatever reason.

Yes, because indentured servitude or slavery is a much better social model for the labor market.

My guess is the US workers accept "at will" because they either don't know any better or believe they have little choice in the matter.

There's always the "we're doing it so it must be the best system" school of thought...

 

[AthenaAwakened]

They accept it because they believe it is good and right and righteous to accept it.

A friend of mine is nurse. She used to work here in at the local hospital. She has since gotten a better job in Raleigh/Durham area. But while here, she used to hear in the halls of the hospital "Lord, I'm just blessed to have a job."

You wont just hear that in hospitals, but everywhere around here, from slaughterhouses and to law firms. People who don't negotiate formal work contracts have been convinced that a job is a blessing and working is always, even under horrendous conditions for starvation wages, a good thing.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The more you protect workers from being fired the harder it is to find a job and the higher the unemployment rate.

 

[arkirk]

The more you protect workers from being fired the harder it is to find a job and the higher the unemployment rate.

That is just what the capitalists all say....We won't let workers ever have job security. It would threaten our profit margins. You simply do not get it. Those workers will have to eat and be clothed and housed and educated under any circumstance. Just kicking the lesser lights in our society to the curb gets you a lot of people laying on the curb. Somehow that seems acceptable to you?

 

[AthenaAwakened]

The more you protect workers from being fired

The smaller the employee turnover and the longer workers work.

the harder it is to find a job and the higher the unemployment rate.

If there is money to be made, employers will employ and will do so regardless of worker protection.

 

[ronburgundy]

The smaller the employee turnover and the longer workers work.

the harder it is to find a job and the higher the unemployment rate.

If there is money to be made, employers will employ and will do so regardless of worker protection.

This bolded part is the key assumption. Only if an employer can be sure that hiring an employee will increase their own profits, will they be sure to hire them.
Such certainty is less common outside large companies with massive volume and thus rather predictable demand for their product, and where the skills required to perform the task are minimal.
If demand for my product in uncertain and variable, and the ability of any employee to do the work is uncertain, then hiring them could easily lead to a loss in profit. If the employer cannot fire them if and when they turn out to cause profit loss, then the employer will sometimes not take the risk of hiring them.

Adding labor is necessary but not sufficient to increase profit. There must also be a demand for what that labor produces and the ability for that labor to produce what is demanded at a lower cost than the price its sold for. These extra factors make adding labor a risk - reward decision. Being able to fire whenever those other conditions are not met and the labor leads to profit loss lower the risk of hiring and thus increases the decision to hire in situations where the reward of doing so is not certain.

That said, requiring notice still keeps risk relatively low and thus would not reduce hiring.

In sum, without being able to fire at will, Wallmart and McDonald's would still hire as many people. However, but a mom-and-pop shop with 1-2 employees whose business is picking up but could drop at any moment would wait to hire until it was more certain that they are losing potential $ and will continue to do so unless they expand their labor.

I support many things Unions do, but the only area where preventing at-will firing makes good sense are those public sector jobs where there is little change in a downturn in demand/need and where being fired for unjust political or personal agendas unrelated to competence and productivity would otherwise be common. Teachers and scientists in the public sector are the most obvious candidates that meet these criteria, which is why tenure makes the most sense for them.

 

[arkirk]

The smaller the employee turnover and the longer workers work.If there is money to be made, employers will employ and will do so regardless of worker protection.

This bolded part is the key assumption. Only if an employer can be sure that hiring an employee will increase their own profits, will they be sure to hire them.
Such certainty is less common outside large companies with massive volume and thus rather predictable demand for their product, and where the skills required to perform the task are minimal.
If demand for my product in uncertain and variable, and the ability of any employee to do the work is uncertain, then hiring them could easily lead to a loss in profit. If the employer cannot fire them if and when they turn out to cause profit loss, then the employer will sometimes not take the risk of hiring them.

Adding labor is necessary but not sufficient to increase profit. There must also be a demand for what that labor produces and the ability for that labor to produce what is demanded at a lower cost than the price its sold for. These extra factors make adding labor a risk - reward decision. Being able to fire whenever those other conditions are not met and the labor leads to profit loss lower the risk of hiring and thus increases the decision to hire in situations where the reward of doing so is not certain.

That said, requiring notice still keeps risk relatively low and thus would not reduce hiring.

In sum, without being able to fire at will, Wallmart and McDonald's would still hire as many people. However, but a mom-and-pop shop with 1-2 employees whose business is picking up but could drop at any moment would wait to hire until it was more certain that they are losing potential $ and will continue to do so unless they expand their labor.

I support many things Unions do, but the only area where preventing at-will firing makes good sense are those public sector jobs where there is little change in a downturn in demand/need and where being fired for unjust political or personal agendas unrelated to competence and productivity would otherwise be common. Teachers and scientists in the public sector are the most obvious candidates that meet these criteria, which is why tenure makes the most sense for them.

So according to you, tenure "makes sense" for some people who just happen to land in certain economic sector. You still don't get it. Most of the problematic at will firings are followed by a move to China or Taiwan or Malasia or Bangladesh. Once they pack up the "If there is money to be made" part of the formula becomes a built-in business factor. Walmart is the world's largest IMPORTER. McDonalds sells you bergers from Australia. Capital predators are at work in every quarter of capitalism. I believe we will always have something of a mixed economy but the Walmart and McDonalds models will have to go...if we are to avoid a slow drift backwards and further into wage slavery. We really need to separate out some forms of production and socialize them. Perhaps the energy sector, so we can move aggressively toward energy independence and a better environment. Democracy in the workplace would keep more workers on the job. That is a fact your really cannot deny. Newer forms of socialism have still to be born. That is the result of open informational channels and we can have a better life than we currently have, but we have to actively seek it...god is just not handing out gifts these days. Neither are the capitalists and predators.

 

[ronburgundy]

This bolded part is the key assumption. Only if an employer can be sure that hiring an employee will increase their own profits, will they be sure to hire them.
Such certainty is less common outside large companies with massive volume and thus rather predictable demand for their product, and where the skills required to perform the task are minimal.
If demand for my product in uncertain and variable, and the ability of any employee to do the work is uncertain, then hiring them could easily lead to a loss in profit. If the employer cannot fire them if and when they turn out to cause profit loss, then the employer will sometimes not take the risk of hiring them.

Adding labor is necessary but not sufficient to increase profit. There must also be a demand for what that labor produces and the ability for that labor to produce what is demanded at a lower cost than the price its sold for. These extra factors make adding labor a risk - reward decision. Being able to fire whenever those other conditions are not met and the labor leads to profit loss lower the risk of hiring and thus increases the decision to hire in situations where the reward of doing so is not certain.

That said, requiring notice still keeps risk relatively low and thus would not reduce hiring.

In sum, without being able to fire at will, Wallmart and McDonald's would still hire as many people. However, but a mom-and-pop shop with 1-2 employees whose business is picking up but could drop at any moment would wait to hire until it was more certain that they are losing potential $ and will continue to do so unless they expand their labor.

I support many things Unions do, but the only area where preventing at-will firing makes good sense are those public sector jobs where there is little change in a downturn in demand/need and where being fired for unjust political or personal agendas unrelated to competence and productivity would otherwise be common. Teachers and scientists in the public sector are the most obvious candidates that meet these criteria, which is why tenure makes the most sense for them.

So according to you, tenure "makes sense" for some people who just happen to land in certain economic sector. You still don't get it.

First, they don't "happen" to land there. These are specific professions people choose to enter and in which at-will firings serve no risk avoidance function and only serve to allow unjust vindictive firings of specific individuals by people acting against the public's interest with the public's money.

Most of the problematic at will firings are followed by a move to China or Taiwan or Malasia or Bangladesh. Once they pack up the "If there is money to be made" part of the formula becomes a built-in business factor. Walmart is the world's largest IMPORTER. McDonalds sells you bergers from Australia. Capital predators are at work in every quarter of capitalism.

Sure, greed is everywhere, including among many workers who often go to lengths to falsify their productivity and thereby harm both profits and their fellow workers. But not allowing private employers to fire people when their labor is a net loss is a bad idea that harms everyone in the long run and definitely will reduce employers willingness to hire a person when there is any risk that they won't yield more revenue than they cost.
Massive layoffs just to rehire the same positions in a place with fewer public protecting regulations is just one type of "at-will" firing, and should be addressed with more specific policies than blanket impediments to reducing (rather than replacing) one's workforce.

I believe we will always have something of a mixed economy but the Walmart and McDonalds models will have to go...if we are to avoid a slow drift backwards and further into wage slavery. We really need to separate out some forms of production and socialize them. Perhaps the energy sector, so we can move aggressively toward energy independence and a better environment.

Sure, I agree some production should be socialized, much like education should. If that is done, then some other sectors would share that feature with teachers and academic scientists. However, even then, the demand for energy and different forms of it will still be highly variable, making it unlike basic education, and making tenure less applicable. Someone in charge would still have to be able to fire perfectly competent people simply because their was no need for their labor any more and paying for it wastes limited resources and thus harms the public good.

Democracy in the workplace would keep more workers on the job. That is a fact your really cannot deny.

Yes I can deny it, because any plausible model of economics refutes it. Democratic will is ruled 99% by irrational emotion, and often produces outcomes that harm the very people who voted for the actions that caused those outcomes. Democratic control over hiring and firing would drive countless companies into the ground and countless workers into unemployment. They would vote to hire and retain all their buddies no matter how it impacted the companies ability to turn a profit and thus to exist.
Whether private or public, hiring and firing decisions should not be up to democratic vote of the workers, but up to particular individuals who are themselves evaluated and hired/fired based upon their carefull consideration of reducing wasted resources and matching labor to what is actually needed, either to turn a profit or to achieve the public good efficiently.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The more you protect workers from being fired the harder it is to find a job and the higher the unemployment rate.

That is just what the capitalists all say....We won't let workers ever have job security. It would threaten our profit margins. You simply do not get it. Those workers will have to eat and be clothed and housed and educated under any circumstance. Just kicking the lesser lights in our society to the curb gets you a lot of people laying on the curb. Somehow that seems acceptable to you?

Look at the unemployment rates, especially of the young, in areas with strong worker protections.

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The smaller the employee turnover and the longer workers work.

the harder it is to find a job and the higher the unemployment rate.

If there is money to be made, employers will employ and will do so regardless of worker protection.

No. The more worker protections the more expensive workers become and thus the higher profits companies will have to see in order to hire. Look at the unemployment rates of the young in Europe!

 

[AthenaAwakened]

That is just what the capitalists all say....We won't let workers ever have job security. It would threaten our profit margins. You simply do not get it. Those workers will have to eat and be clothed and housed and educated under any circumstance. Just kicking the lesser lights in our society to the curb gets you a lot of people laying on the curb. Somehow that seems acceptable to you?

Look at the unemployment rates, especially of the young, in areas with strong worker protections.

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The smaller the employee turnover and the longer workers work.

the harder it is to find a job and the higher the unemployment rate.

If there is money to be made, employers will employ and will do so regardless of worker protection.

No. The more worker protections the more expensive workers become and thus the higher profits companies will have to see in order to hire.

So?

Look at the unemployment rates of the young in Europe!

OK! I AM LOOKING!

 

[bilby]

Look at the unemployment rates, especially of the young, in areas with strong worker protections.

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The smaller the employee turnover and the longer workers work.

the harder it is to find a job and the higher the unemployment rate.

If there is money to be made, employers will employ and will do so regardless of worker protection.

No. The more worker protections the more expensive workers become and thus the higher profits companies will have to see in order to hire.

So?

Look at the unemployment rates of the young in Europe!

OK! I AM LOOKING!

Me too.

In the US, (according to BLS), the youth unemployment rate was 12.2 percent in July 2015

In the UK, (according to the UK Government's briefing paper 'Youth unemployment statistics'), the unemployment rate (the proportion of the economically active population who are unemployed) for 16-24 year olds was 16.0% in the quarter April-June 2015

In Australia, (according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare), the unemployment rate for 15-24 year olds was 13% in 2014.

Given that there are differences in the way these stats are measured, those numbers don't seem to be wildly different. Certainly there is no big difference between the US and Australian figures; despite Australia having very strong worker protections.

It seems that the only way to get the numbers to match your narrative is to cherry pick them. It also seems likely that there are other factors than just worker protections that influence the differing rates of youth unemployment between these three nations.

 

[Bacillus anthracis]

At-will employment is a necessary evil in a capitalist economy. Don't get me wrong, I do believe in the profit motive to a pretty good degree.

Companies generally don't fire someone for the simple reason of being mean. They do it because it's necessary for the overall health of the company. And it's naive to not think that some employees simply don't work out for whatever reason; and it's worth considering that in an economic downturn, that a company shouldn't have to either keep employees on or risk a lawsuit from every single one in order to explain cause. The legal fees alone, even if the suits were successfully defended in arbitration, let alone a court room, would kill off most businesses.

Further, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Most people know they can be let go at any time; not because of some arbitrary abuse, but because that's the way things are. And even if they don't know that, it doesn't mean their firing or dismissal was improper. A reasonable person of reasonable age and experience, is considered to have notice of at-will employment, if not explicitly from their employer than from simply being alive long enough.

There will always be occurrences of unfairness, but to saddle every business with having to have cause to fire someone would be disastrous. Businesses don't want to fire people, believe it or not. Turnover costs money generally speaking. Having to train a new person and get them up to speed means lost production time. It's also bad for morale and stressful for management.