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Dismissal is a major issue for distributive justice at work, because it normally has a drastic impact on an employee's livelihood, self-esteem and future career. This article examines distributive justice under the US's employment-at-will (EAW) system and New Zealand's justcause dismissal system, focusing on the three main categories of dismissal, namely misconduct, poor performance and redundancy. Under EAW, employees have limited protection from dismissal and remedies are restricted to just a few so-called exceptions. Comparatively, New Zealand's justcause system delivers much more just outcomes, both in terms of remedies and punishments. Despite a few shortcomings, it should be considered as a reasonable reference for policy changes in the US.

This study analyzes the at-will employment doctrine using a tool that encompasses the complementarity of results-based utilitarian ethics, rule-based duty ethics, and virtue-based character ethics. The paper begins with a discussion of the importance of the problem followed by its evolution and current status. After describing the method of analysis, the central section evaluates the employment at-will doctrine, and is informed by Lord Acton's dictum, \"power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.\" The conclusion explores the implications of the findings.

Employment-at-will (EAW) is the legal presumption that employers and employees may terminate an employment relationship for any or no reason. Defenders of EAW have argued that it promotes autonomy and efficiency. Critics have argued that it allows for the domination, subordination, and arbitrary treatment of employees. We intervene in this debate by arguing that the case for EAW is contextual in a way that existing business ethics scholarship has not considered. In particular, we argue that the justifiability of EAW for a given jurisdiction depends on existing complementarities among the institutions that constitute the jurisdiction’s political economy. Notably, our view takes seriously the ethical concerns EAW critics have raised by showing how these concerns can be mitigated through public policy measures that do not require eliminating EAW.

British Master and Servant law made employee contract breach a criminal offense until 1875. We develop a contracting model generating equilibrium contract breach and prosecutions, then exploit exogenous changes in output prices to examine the effects of labor demand shocks on prosecutions. Positive shocks in the textile, iron, and coal industries increased prosecutions. Following the abolition of criminal sanctions, wages differentially rose in counties that had experienced more prosecutions, and wages responded more to labor demand shocks. Coercive contract enforcement was applied in industrial Britain; restricted mobility allowed workers to commit to risk-sharing contracts with lower, but less volatile, wages.

Over the past 3 decades, the U.S. Temporary Help Services (THS) industry grew five times more rapidly than overall employment. Contemporaneously, courts in 46 states adopted exceptions to the common law doctrine of employment at will that limited employers’ discretion to terminate workers and opened them to litigation. This article assesses the contribution of “unjust dismissal” doctrine to THS employment specifically, and outsourcing more generally, finding that it is substantial—explaining 20% of the growth of THS between 1973 and 1995 and contributing 500,000 additional outsourced workers in 2000. States with smaller declines in unionization also saw substantially more THS growth.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Significantly, these protected characteristics are undefined, and judicial interpretations of race, sex, and national origin have allowed employers to lawfully discriminate against proxies for these protected characteristics. This Note examines the use of race-based hairstyles, gendered-appearance standards, and citizenship as proxies for race, sex, and national origin, respectively, and how the availability of such proxies inhibits Title VII's goal of creating equal employment opportunities. The Supreme Court's dicta in Bostock v. Clayton County offer potential redress to some victims of proxy discrimination through a protected characteristic plus proxy framework, but its application is limited and authority still unclear. Legislative intervention is likely necessary to strike the proper balance between equalizing employment opportunities and preserving employer autonomy to make employment decisions. This Note proposes varying levels of statutory enumeration--broad enumeration, narrow enumeration, and no enumeration--for race, sex, and national origin, respectively, to balance the competing goals of creating equal employment opportunities on the basis of protected characteristics and maintaining employer autonomy.

Under this balancing test, if the rights of the public employee outweigh the rights of the public employer, the speech is protected. [...]a public employee cannot be disciplined or terminated for such speech. * Public employee speech where a public employee is not speaking as a private citizen on matters of public concern is not protected. 6 However, public employers have an interest in maintaining discipline in the workplace. [...]t)he problem in any case is to arrive at a balance between the interests of the (public employee), as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of public concern and the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees.\"! [...]to the extent that the Board's position here can be taken to suggest that even comments on matters of public concern that are substantially correct may furnish grounds for dismissal if they are sufficiently critical in tone, we unequivocally reject it. 1° Accordingly, the Court ruled the termination was illegal: \"In sum, we hold that, in a case such as this, absent proof of false statements knowingly or recklessly made by him, a teacher's exercise of his right to speak on issues of public importance may not furnish the basis for his dismissal from public employment.\" According to the Connick Court: When a public employee speaks not as a citizen upon matters of public concern, but instead as an employee upon matters only of personal interest, absent the most unusual circumstances, a federal court is not the appropriate forum in which to review the wisdom of a personnel decision taken by a public agency allegedly in reaction to the employee's behavior.??

The unsustainable power imbalance between corporations and their employees has resulted in the physical and emotional abuse of workers. This power disparity has existed for decades. Congress has stepped in on several occasions to address the problem. Workplace law is at another apex where the power disparity between companies and employees has grown too large. The current failure of our political system has left Congress unable to act. A different approach to workplace power is necessary, and this Article offers a much-needed proposal that addresses existing employer abuses.

Employment contracts for most employees are not publicly available, leaving researchers to speculate about whether they contain postemployment restrictions on employee mobility, and if so, what those provisions look like. Using a large sample of publicly available CEO employment contracts, the authors are able to examine these noncompetition covenants, including postemployment covenants not to compete (\"CNCs\" or \"noncompetes\"), nonsolicitation agreements, and nondisclosure agreements. What they found confirms some long-held assumptions about restrictive covenants but also uncovers some surprises. They begin by discussing why employers use restrictive covenants and examining how the courts have treated them. They then analyze an extensive sample of CEO employment contracts drawn from a large random sample of 500 S&P 1500 companies. They find that 80% of these employment contracts contain CNCs, often with a broad geographic scope, and that these generally last only one to two years.