Although most employees today are technically “at-will,” employers are significantly restrained by federal and state anti-discrimination laws in discharging employees in protected class. Protected class employees are simply types of employees who are legally protected from employment related discrimination under particular statutes (discrimination or harrassment based on race, color, religion, national origin and sex).
Example:
Employees who are at least 40 years old are protected by the Age Discrimination in Employment ACT (ADEA) from being discriminated because of their age; African Americans are protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from workplace discrimination based on their race.
Technically, the anti-discrimination laws do not eliminate employment at-will with respect to employees in protected classes. However, the anti-discrimination laws make it much harder for an employee to fire an employee in a protected class for a “bad (but not illegal) reason or no reason” than an employee who is not in a protected class. Why? If the discharged employee files a claim under an anti-discrimination law, judges and juries often view discharges that don’t appear to be justified by good cause as likely having been motivated by the employee’s protected class, even if the employer denies it.
If an at-will employee is not in a protected class, does he or she have any protections against unfair discharges? Probably, but that depends on the courts in the state in which the employee works have created or accepted exceptions to the employment at-will doctrine.
If an employee is discharged under circumstance that the courts in the employee’s state consider to be an exception to the at-will doctrine, the employee may be able to recover damages from the employer in a wrongful-discharge lawsuit. Wrongful discharge is a common-law legal claim; that is, it is a claim based on law created by court decisions, not state or federal statutes, that the employer did not have the legal right to discharge a particular employee in a particular situation. There are four general categories of exceptions that are available in some (not all) states:
- Discharge in violation of public policy
- Discharge in violation of an implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing
- Discharge in breach of an implied contract
- Tortious discharge