Fired Without Warning or Reason: Why New Yorkers Need Just Cause Job Protections
By Irene Tung, Paul Sonn, Anika Dandekar, Amy Pinilla, and Angeles Solis
In the United States, unlike in most other countries in the world, employers can legally fire most workers without warning or explanation. These firings can cause great harm to workers and their families when the paycheck they depend on is there one day and gone the next. Even for workers who aren’t fired, the fact that their employers have such outsized control over their livelihoods intensifies the power imbalance between them and their employer. This in turn can create pressure on workers to accept substandard working conditions and undermine their ability to speak up about legal violations, mistreatment, or abuse.
A growing movement across the country is calling for the adoption of “just cause” laws that would require employers to provide advance notice, a good reason, and a fair process for any termination. Fastfood workers in New York City have been at the forefront of this movement by successfully campaigning for the adoption of a new local law prohibiting unfair and abrupt firings. Widely popular across the political spectrum, such just cause laws promote economic security and stability for workers and their families and protect workers from being punished or fired in retaliation for speaking up about critical workplace problems such as wage theft, discrimination, or health and safety violations.
New York City can continue to lead the nation on this important issue by adopting the Secure Jobs Act (Intro. 837), which would prohibit unfair and abrupt terminations and extend just cause job protections to all workers in the city.
To better understand the problem of unfair terminations in New York City, Secure Jobs NYC, a coalition of groups that includes the National Employment Law Project and Make the Road New York, partnered with Data for Progress to conduct a survey of the city’s workforce (employed and unemployed). The results document just how widespread unfair and abrupt firings are for workers in all kinds of jobs and how the threat of losing a job causes many to accept abusive or illegal working conditions. Survey results also show a large majority of workers are subject to electronic monitoring on the job. Finally, the survey finds overwhelming support for greater job security protections among workers across the political spectrum. The margin of error for the survey was +/-4 percent.