End "At-Will Employment" Laws Now!

"At-Will Employment" laws in most states give employers the right to layoff and/or fire people without valid and/or anti-discriminatory cause, thus circumventing U.S. constitutional laws prohibiting discrimination. Therefore, those laws should be declared federally unconstitutional, instead prescribing that employers must provide demonstrably valid reasons for all layoffs and firings. Furthermore, justice demands that since employers have means of retaliating (either through litigation or via negative references) against abrupt voluntarily departing employees while fired or laid-off ones have little or no lawful recourse in "At-Will" states, federal law should mandate employers' minimum reasonable advance notification of contemplated layoffs/firings, thus enabling employees to at least seek alternative means of income if not redress of grievances. We need to not only pressure each state to voluntarily overturn despicable "At-Will Employment" laws and replace them with laws requiring employers to validate layoffs/firings, but also petition our federal government to mandate employer accountability and declare "At-Will Employment" laws unconstitutional. (Exemptions should likely be built into such new legislation based on company size or other mitigating circumstances.) General examples of the harm of leaving existing laws in place include not only the negative effects on individuals, but also the enabling of demonstrably invalid corporate claims of financial hardship at times of massive layoffs. Specific legislation could require that valid layoffs only be permissable if average or lowest worker wages rise above a certain percentage in relation to the average executive salaries and the top salary at any so-regulated business (e.g., that the average worker salary must be not worse than 20 times lower than that of the average executive, and/or the lowest worker wage not be equivalent to less than 50 times lower than that of the average executive and not less than 100 times lower than that of the highest paid executive--or some other reasonable formula having a similar effect). Had such federal legislation been in place, our economy would likely be in much better shape because the pressure on businesses to act equitably would either cause workers to have higher earnings or help prevent the massive layoffs that have resulted in the severe loss of consumer spending which has characterized our troubled economy.