It’s not that there aren’t any, it’s that the protections for workers are abysmal compared to protections for businesses.

For example, if I stole money from my employer, they could have me arrested and press charges for theft.

On the other hand, if I am able to prove that my employer hasn’t been paying me fairly and has been shorting my paychecks, I can spend a lot of money to take them to court, and in most cases, all that will happen is the business will have to… pay you back exactly what they already owed you. They won’t pay fines, no one will go to jail, and it’s an “oops” and then slap on the wrist kind of deal.

Worker protections exist, but the deck is stacked against us.

Basically the case, yes. It varies state by state and there are some federal laws but, the enforcement is lacking to say the least and funding tends to be gutted to make it worse. Effectively, since Reagan, there’s been an unending attack on labor rights and regulations. Currently, multiple states are passing laws to bring back child labor and workers who try to unionize are getting axed with no real repercussions.

“Firing on the spot” is just one item on a long list. No maternity leave, health insurance bound to the job, reliance on tips to pay workers, lack of whistleblower protection, laughable PTO, limited paid time off for health reasons. All of that has been solved in civilized countries, except for the US.

In many US states have what’s referred to as “at-will” employment. When you accept the terms of your employment, there’s a small disclaimer that states that you can be fired for anything at anytime for any reason and without notice.

This is also why we have so many lawsuits here.

So, while there’s no full protection, there are laws available that say you can’t be fired for certain things, and if you can prove that you were fired due to simply being of a “protected class” or in retaliation for reporting a workplace violation, you can sue and can likely win through settlement or decision.

The thing is, few employers will maintain records that indicate that they fired Anita because she was black or Howard because he was gay. It’s usually “Anita had 4 errors in the last year” if pressed for detail. That’s why if you feel any sense of discrimination or other unfairness on the job here, it’s a good idea to keep records of the incidents and dates in a CYA file (Cover Your Ass), just in case.

Constitutionally, after a little scuffle in the mid 1800’s, a person or business can’t own an employee. Other than that not really, we usually got to strike and revolt if we want anything, but they keep us so poor that it makes it an untenable option.

The vast majority of the US has “at will employment”. It means you can be fired any time for whatever reason…or even for no reason.

However, there are a few reasons you cannot be fired. You can’t be fired because of your race, gender, sexuality, age, whether or not you are pregnant.

HOWEVER, because an employer does not have to give a reason for firing you, they could theoretically do something like fire you for something like being gay and pretend it was for some other reason. If you can prove that they fired you for being gay, you can go to court, but that’s exceptionally difficult to impossible to do. So really they can fire you for anything.

Some jobs are unionized, making it harder for employers to fire you willy nilly though. Most jobs are not unionized in the US.

You guys get employee protections? What are those like?

I work because I need medical insurance to live. I cannot afford medical insurance on my own without a job. I make 6 figures and live paycheck to paycheck. If I lose my job, I will probably be homeless.

I would love to live in a world with employee protections. I’m not sure what those protections would be but anything better than what we’ve got seems good.

Others have covered the details of labor laws in the US, so I won’t touch on that, but your question does make me think about why those kinds of labor protection laws are even seen as a necessity. And I think the answer to that is we (most people, not just Americans) view jobs as equal to livelihood.

But it makes you wonder what the world could be like if we had a universal basic income, where getting fired wasn’t actually the worst thing that could happen to you. It might still suck, but you’d still be able to have a roof over your head and food on your table while you searched for new work. This, critically, would give you more negotiating power when finding new jobs, as you’d likely be less desperate for a job, meaning you could credibly insist upon better pay and better conditions.

But we could take this one step further. In economics, there’s this concept called an externality, which is when you do something that affects someone else as a side effect. When you do something that harms someone else as a side effect (e.g., pollution), that’s called a negative externality. Negative externalities are actually a major problem in completely unregulated economies, because they cause the “invisible hand” of the free market to fail to achieve optimal distribution of goods, i.e., a market failure. The classic example of this is carbon emissions – the true cost to society of carbon emissions (from climate change) is not reflected in the cost of providing carbon-intensive goods, thus we have a tendency to over-produce and over-consume carbon-intensive goods and services. That is, the economy would be better off in the long-run if we emitted less carbon than we currently are, despite the short-term profits of polluting. Anyhoo, this mismatch between sticker price and true cost to society is why carbon tax is almost universally regarded to be the single best climate policy: by accounting for the costs of the negative externality, you can fix the market failure, and the invisible hand can once again work as it’s supposed to.

But where this relates to where I was going is there are also positive externalities, where you have a positive impact on someone else as a side effect of your activities. An example might be doing regenerative agriculture or rewilding a patch of land – the pollinator habitat you provide or the carbon you sequester has positive impacts on other people. And like how negative externalities tend to lead to overconsumption, positive externalities tend to lead to underconsumption. I.e., the economy would be net better off of more people did rewilding and regenerative agriculture, despite the short-term immediate costs they incur. And much like taxing negative externalities (e.g., carbon emissions) is a good way to correct those issues, subsidizing positive externalities is a good way to fix the issues of insufficient good activities.

So imagine if we not only had a UBI, but if the government also would pay you to plant trees or develop/maintain open-source software or any number of other activities that produce positive externalities. If we had these alternative means of maintaining a basic level of livelihood, then maybe we could decouple existing from jobs, and we wouldn’t feel a strong need to coerce businesses into holding onto people, nor would we need to coerce them into paying people enough or giving good enough working conditions – companies would have to pay well and offer good conditions and not fire for unfair reasons, else they’d struggle to fill vacancies.

We all saw how companies begrudgingly had to pay more during the “great resignation”. Or look how the professional class (e.g., doctors, engineers) get good pay and good conditions, precisely because they’re hard to replace. Give workers more options, make them less desperate, and they’ll be empowered to negotiate better pay and better conditions for themselves. Sure, some regulations would still be necessary, but I think there’s a lot of elegance in a bottom-up approach to labor relations.

We have a lot of laws, enforcement is the thing we lack.

We have quite a lot of employee protections (not as much as Europe but a lot more than people realize), it’s the enforcement that is the issue. While you can be fired without notice for any legal reason, if you are fired for an illegal reason or an illegal reason played a role in their decision to fire you, you can get quite a nice settlement from that. However, if you are fired without a good reason, the employer has to pay for your unemployment, so the majority of employers will only fire an employee if it falls under a reason that makes you ineligible for unemployment like poor performance or attendance (and labor attorneys can often sniff out when an employer is lying about it to screw you out of unemployment). Contrary to several other countries, employees can just quit without notice or even informing their employer, as at will employment goes both ways

THAT’S FREEDOM BAYBAY!

sobs

So what they’re referring to in that instance “you can be fired on the spot” there are states that have laws that say employees are basically working “at will” and can be fired without explanation or cause unless the employee is apart of a protected class and is fired for being in a protected class, an example of this is a member of the LGBTQ+ community being fired for their sexual orientation. There are states that protect against this but it’s a state by state basis.

There’s actually quite a few at the federal level – not enough, but they exist. There’s a decent overview of the federal labor laws available here. Individual states also have additional laws, and shockingly “liberal” (in the American sense) states tend to have stronger worker protections than “conservative” ones.

Of course scumbag employers count on most people not knowing those laws or how to report violations and will actively push misinformation about them.

Edit:

As a bonus, have a Walmart anti-union propaganda training video, because Walmart cares about you..

Different states have different laws. It’s a farce

That’s why we have unions. And why republicans work really hard to prevent unions.