Re:Zynga Chief Seeks to Claw Back Stock
by OstiaAntica on Thursday November 10, 2011 @05:52AM
(#3219671)
If the startup is struggling or making a pivot, it might need to lay off employees who are performing fine.
Of course, the reverse is true also. Employees can leave at any time for any reason as well.
Overall, at-will employment keeps companies and labor markets flexible.
If the startup is struggling or making a pivot, it might need to lay off employees who are performing fine.
Then you make those positions redundant (or in british english terminology, you 'let them go'). It's perfectly legal (in EU which doesn't have this at-will stuff) to say "We no longer need a Django programmer, since we're moving to Ruby on Rails now, we know you're a great django programmer, but we're letting you go". You don't need 'at-will employment' to have this advantage. There are some limitations, like you actually have to make the position redundent, you can't hire your brother as a django developer the next day. But that's the point, it balances out the power.
I do not understand why you need at-will employment. If an employee is behaving badly or underperforming, then you have an excuse to fire them. If you got rid of at-will employment, you can still fire bad employees. Abolishing at-will employment will just make it hard for companies to screw over employees unfairly. This is not a bad thing IMO.