It's All Too Easy to Get Fired in America: In 49 of 50 States, You Can Be Fired for Any Reason

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The closest any state has come to a just-cause law was Colorado’s 2008 Initiative 76, but it was scuttled before it even reached the ballot. Employment-at-will reigns supreme for the foreseeable future. In comparison, even the Montana Wrongful Discharge Act still looks pretty good, a testament to the utter awfulness of the status quo. Every labor lawyer interviewed expressed appreciation for it, despite the limitations.

“I think it’s worked: employers are more sensitive as to basically complying with their own procedures [the law requires employers to follow the rules laid out in their employee handbooks],” says Gary Spaeth, who still works in Helena as a lobbyist. “Prior to that they felt that employment-at-will allowed them a lot of latitude with not even complying with their own procedures and that’s how the wrongful discharge [court rulings] arose. There were very egregious situations.”

But not to worry, the Montana business community appears eager to bring its state back down to the rest of the nation’s level. At the end of April, the Republican-dominated legislature passed a bill that kept the four-year cap on damages, but halved the amount an employee could recover (so if she had worked four years she could only win back two years' worth of damages). But on May 6, Democratic governor Steve Bullock, a former employee-side labor lawyer, vetoed the revision.

“Those people think that employment-at-will means they can just willy-nilly terminate people, and I don’t think that’s where we should be going,” says Spaeth.