Employment at Will

Not quite the usual post here, something a bit more academic and law-related from ContractsProf Blog. The post Bales on Employment at Will comments on a law review article and there is a link to the article and an abstract of the article in the post. So, go there if you want to read the article. I found the commentary I quote below interesting. For those who might not know, employment-at-will a cornerstone of Indiana employment law.

"One of the problems in explaining the growth of at-will employment in 19th century America is that it originally sprang into existence not in the industrialized states of the North, where factory-owners were increasingly viewing workers as replaceable parts to hire and fire as they chose, but in the least industrialized states. It was the states of the South and West which were early adopters, while the big industrial states like New York and Pennsylvania came much later. This fact raises problems for what is perhaps the most widely held explanation for at-will employment, which is that it was a judge-made rule to benefit capitalist businesses at the expense of workers.

But Bales offers a different and ingenious take on the subject. True, he said, it wasn't the industrialists of the Northeast who pushed the rule through. (They presumably lacked the political power in the industrialized states to get their own judges to adopt favorable rules.) But the point of the new rule was still to benefit businesses that were increasing in size and scope. Courts in Southern and Western states, he theorizes, adopted the rule to attract industry by offering better rules for the capitalists than they were already getting in New York and Pennsylvania. It was this competition, he argues, that ultimately led the industrial states to go along with the trend.

I feel both paragraphs say something about Indiana now. What I cannot know right now is whether our reliance on employment-at-will is still a good thing or another item on the list pushing Indiana towards Third World status.