At-will employment is a joke. 2 weeks unpaid maternity leave is a joke. Reasonable public policy would prevent unions from completing with each other on these fronts to the demise of their own organizations.
I will be the first to admit that I am generally pro-business. Earlier comments make it clear I am generally anti-union, or at best ambivalent. That being said, I can generally understand the argument of the other side, even if I disagree with it.
But I don't understand at all the sentiment that at-will employment is negative. I believe if you're bad at your job, your boss should be able to fire you. That day. The obvious straw man here is "well at-will means you can be fired for anything, so if you wear yellow shoes and your boss doesn't like yellow he can fire you," which just never happens. So that nonsense aside, I honestly do not know what the opposition to at-will employment is.
I feel like you set up a straw man that supports your point rather than the opposing point. How about this: A company's owners resent paying for health insurance but know that they have to do it to attract employees. To lower health insurance costs, they invent infractions to fire women and anyone age 50 or older.
Or a startup example: A company offers low pay and generous stock options that vest after 5 years of employment. Then they fire 90% of the employees in their fourth year.
You don't understand it because you have declared that the argument of the other side to "never happen" and declared it "nonsense" to begin with.
But if you think it never happens, you are being naive and wrong. I have over the years had first hand knowledge of plenty of people being fired for reasons which have nothing to do with work performance at multiple companies. I've managed to stop some other attempts in the companies I've worked at, others were entirely out of my control to do anything about.
> I believe if you're bad at your job, your boss should be able to fire you. That day.
Even if we were to stipulate that no boss ever abuses this to fire you for unrelated reasons, this is also a strange attitude to me.
If you're bad at your job, your boss did a bad job interviewing you for the role and/or did a bad job providing adequate training. Also, if an employee is that bad at hiring the right people, I have little reason to trust that they are not also bad at ensuring they only fire people that are objectively bad at their job.
A process that does not give the employee some degree of recourse to argue their case and/or try to redeem themselves seems to me to be inherently one sided, unfair and abusive.
That does not mean I believe that an employee should be allowed to coast forever, but there is a massive gap from firing instantly to letting some coast forever. Such as e.g. the typical UK process, which usually involves raising a concern and formally drawing up a plan for improving performance together with the employee, followed by warnings if targets are not met, and finally termination. Yes, some people takes the piss and uses this to collect a paycheck a bit longer, others take it seriously and improves and become valuable employees; others will decide to leave on their own accord once they realise they will fail to meet requirements.
You could also be fired because you would be better at your boss' job than he is and he wants to get rid of you before his boss notices.
You could also be fired because you refuse to do something dangerous and insist that it should be done in a less-dangerous but more expensive way.
At-will employment isn't a blank check for discriminatory practices.