Employment at Will

Employment at Will

The employment-at-will doctrine:

three major exceptions

In the United States, employees without a written

employment contract generally can be fired

for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all;

judicial exceptions to the rule seek

to prevent wrongful terminations

Charles J. Muhl

Work joyfully and peacefully, knowing that

right thoughts and right efforts will

inevitably bring about right results

—James Allen

See only that thou work and thou canst

not escape the reward

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

L

Charles J. Muhl,

formerly an economist

with the Bureau of

Labor Statistics,

Washington, DC, is an

attorney in Chicago,

Illinois.

ike Allen and Emerson, many workers in

the United States believe that satisfactory

job performance should be rewarded with,

among other benefits, job security. However, this

expectation that employees will not be fired if

they perform their jobs well has eroded in recent

decades in the face of an increased incidence

of mass layoffs, reductions in companies’

workforces, and job turnover. In legal terms,

though, since the last half of the 19th century,

employment in each of the United States has been

“at will,” or terminable by either the employer or

employee for any reason whatsoever. The employment-at-will doctrine avows that, when an

employee does not have a written employment

contract and the term of employment is of indefinite duration, the employer can terminate the

employee for good cause, bad cause, or no cause

at all.1

Traditionally and as recently as the early

1900s, courts viewed the relationship between

employer and employee as being on equal foot-

ing in terms of bargaining power. Thus, the employment-at-will doctrine reflected the belief that

people should be free to enter into employment

contracts of a specified duration, but that no obligations attached to either employer or employee

if a person was hired without such a contract.

Because employees were able...