Once it is established that there is an employment relationship, the legal rights of the employee and the legal obligations of the employer will first depend on how the relationship was established and to what degree its details are formalized.
First, legally the employment relationship is a contractual relationship. This is true despite the fact that in the majority of employment relationships there is no written agreement of any kind between the parties! Where there is no legal, written agreement, the relationship between the employer and the employee is presumed to be at-will employment. At will-employment is a relationship in which there is no legal obligation for either party to stay in the relationship; either party may terminate the relationship at any time, and for any reason, so long as the reason for the termination is not illegal.
Another way to summarize the employment-at-will doctrine is that it allows an employer to discharge an employee for “good reasons, bad reasons, or no reasons at all;” provided that the reason for the discharge does not violate the law. Therefore, there is no requirement that the discharge of an at-will employee be fair, for “just cause,” or morally justifiable. An employer could legally discharge a worker over 40 years old, despite the ADEA, just because the employer did not like the color of the employee’s hair, so long as the real reason for the discharge was that and not the employee’s age.
In the past, most at-will employees had no significant right to their jobs. Today, not only are there numerous anti-discrimination statutes that limit the right of employers to terminate employment relationships, but even in situation where there are no statutory limits to an employer’s power to discharge, employees and their attorneys are constantly pressuring the courts to recognize exceptions to the at-will doctrine. These types of challenges are based on the notion that the discharges were unfair or not for proper cause. These challenges have been successful.