Monthly Labor Review
January 2001
3
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
Charles J. Muhl,
formerly an economist
with the Bureau of
Labor Statistics,
Washington, DC, is an
attorney in Chicago,
Illinois.
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
Like 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 em-
ployment-at-will doctrine avows that, when an
employee does not have a written employment
contract and the term of employment is of indefi-
nite 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 em-
ployment-at-will doctrine reflected the belief that
people should be free to enter into employment
contracts of a specified duration, but that no ob-
ligations attached to either employer or employee
if a person was hired without such a contract.
Because employees were able to resign from po-
sitions they no longer cared to occupy, employ-
e