Can’t the company just say “the sun rose in the East today, so we decided to fire you”
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Even at-will contracts have to follow the law, i.e. be enforceable. So if you are hired at-will and get fired because someone doesn’t like your gender, ethnicity, etc. the at-will clause of your employment contract cannot be enforced. This means that when you sue the company for wrongful termination the company cannot then refer to the at-will clause of the contract.
There are still discrimination laws that still apply (gender, race, religion, disability, etc), and typically there is some sort of trail of comments or different treatment that helps prove case.
Even those contracts still havr to abide by the law regarding how ot properly perform terminations.
even ” at will” contracts still have to list what conditions need to be met that would define a Breach of contract that would the nbe used as a reference as to why the contract was terminated, aka: the contract has to be enforceable.
if they terminate contract evne at will they owe to tell you why, and if they cant produce this within the terms of the contract, then its a wrongful termination.
At will means you can be fired for *no* reason. That’s different than *a reason that is protected by the law*. Employers will claim it was for no reason, in which case the fired employee then needs to prove it was actually for a protected reason. This is often difficult.
The company can say “the sun rose in the East today so we decided to fire you.”
They cannot say “you are black so we decided to fire you” or “you refused to sleep with me so I decided to fire you”.
When someone fires a wrongful termination lawsuit they are alleging that they got fired for a legally protected reason (race, sex, disability, whistleblowing, retaliation etc.)
Because at-will doesn’t override certain legal protections, such as racism. E.g. you can never fire an employee for being black, even if it’s at-will.
> Can’t the company just say “the sun rose in the East today, so we decided to fire you”
They sure can. The issue occurs when they don’t fire everyone else.
In general it’s expensive to fire employees, since you either have to pay to train their replacements or not replace them and burn out your remaining workforce picking up their duties. Rational companies don’t like to do it without good reason. It’s also *illegal* to fire employees for certain reasons. Judges know both of these things, so if you say you fired somebody because the sun came up but didn’t fire anyone else for the same reason, they know you are lying to them and they start to wonder if maybe the *actual* reason you fired your employee was one of the reasons you aren’t allowed to.
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