What if I want to quit?
If I can't be fired, then the complement to that would be I cannot quit.
There needs to be a balance where I can quit the company and the company can quit me but where companies don't abuse the system (ex Amazon in this example). I don't think there is a great solution, other than a command economy (but there you are not quite free to change "companies" either).
Is there supposed to be a catch here? If you want to quit, then you should be allowed to quit.
To make it explicit: in the vast majority of the developed world, the individual employee's autonomy is given priority. Companies still have broad discretion when it comes to firing; they're simply held to a higher standard of justification than "we don't like you anymore."
This compromise does make sense in a slightly unchanging economy.
Also, if you have highly sought skills this is a detriment, if you have skills that are not in demand, then this is nice to have.
You can also always negotiate an earlier release. These periods offer stability for both parties.
How does this work elsewhere in the world? From a legal point of view at-will employment seems like the default when it comes to buying a service (ie. labor). If you rent a server from amazon you can stop the rental anytime you want, and they can kick you off anytime you want.
I think this gets to the heart of the difference: Americans tend to think of their employment as a continuous exchange of dollars for their labor, whereas most of the world takes the concept of an employment contract to heart.
That contract, in turn, contains both legal and contractual stipulations that prevent firing without cause: employers must give you so-and-so many weeks of notice before beginning the process of firing you, must pay you for so-and-so many months if you present an argument to a labor board, &c. There's nothing informal about it: it's the difference between continuous billing for a service and a fixed-length contract.
Here's a random PDF I found that explains some of the difference between US and French labor contracts[1].
[1]: https://www.bakermckenzie.com/-/media/files/insight/publicat...
A virtualized server from Amazon does not need food, clothing, and shelter to survive. It does not have a family to support. Simply, it is not alive. and laws around humans and commodities should probably be very different.
More cold-hearted practical arguments for businesses: the virtual machine cannot vote in the next election, it cannot contact the local news media to complain about working conditions, it cannot unionize. If things get very bad it cannot buy torches and pitchforks.
Your boss does.
The low hanging fruit analogies are slavery, limited suffrage, and laws against homosexual civil unions, all of which were global norms at one point.
The positive argument is that it's already a fixture and an agreed-upon solution in most of the developed world. The normative argument, i.e. that it's good, is in the next two paragraphs.
This is false. This presumes that all employees are incapable of saving money or seeking alternate employment quickly.
Neither is true.
It doesn't presume anything of the sort: you don't need to make a statement about "all" employees to observe that the average American under 35 has under $10,000 in liquid savings[1]. That can disappear pretty quickly with a car or home accident, unexpected injury, or legal liability. Even outside of those, it's not very much to live on outside of LCoL areas for more than a couple of months.
The average American is also not a tech worker: they're somewhere in the lower middle class, and may or may not have the ability to transition rapidly between jobs (our current funhouse-mirror economy aside). You're making extraordinary presumptions about millions of people, presumptions with very real and material consequences.
But to go even further: we should not be punishing people with the threat of hunger or exposure for failing to keep liquid savings! The current economy doesn't encourage liquid (i.e., conservative) saving techniques, and American education does not consistently include financial planning. The vast majority of Americans are blamelessly "winging it" and should not be punished for that.
To tie a bow around it: I don't need to make a universal statement about every employee in America to correctly observe that many employees are materially threatened by at-will employment. Attempting to promote this into universal claims is bewildering at best; it's immediately obvious to everyone that plenty of people can survive an unexpected firing.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-ame...
The fact that some (tech/highly skilled) workers have actual leverage doesn't negate the fact that many, MANY others don't have any.
We can't operate on how things ought to be, we have to look at how things are actually...and they're bad.
The privates were all paid the same, every two weeks.
Half were able to pay their bills and did well. The other half would spend their paychecks as fast as possible, and would run out of money after 1 week. The 2nd week was spent begging, borrowing, and in general being a deadbeat.
My dad would sit down with them, go over their spending, and prepare budgets for them. Literally none of them were able to adhere to those budgets.
Again, 50%.
It's really only the US that allows employers to unilaterally terminate their employees, and there's ample evidence that companies use it as plausible cover for all sorts of actions that would be illegal (discrimination against protected groups). That, in my book, is indeed something that needs fixing.
But even beyond plausible discrimination: mutual consent is least ambiguous when there's mutual and equal power. No such balance exists in the employer-employed relationship: employees are de facto dependent on their employers for their ability to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.