'At Will' Employment Works Well for Workers and Businesses in Oregon (OPINION)

Rich Meneghello’s article “'At Will' Employment Works Well for Workers and Businesses in Oregon” was featured in The Oregonian on August 20, 2015.

A recent guest column in The Oregonian/OregonLive suggested that the legal protections offered to Oregon employees by the new paid-sick-leave statute and other workplace laws are little more than a sham, arguing that at-will employment destroys any real protection workers could hope to have.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The at-will system benefits modern employers and workers alike.

At-will employment is the tried-and-true model across the country, allowing both employees and employers to end their relationship with each other at any time and for any reason, so long as it's not an illegal reason. Forty-nine of the 50 states use it. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of American workers live in at-will states. There is no good reason for Oregon to radically veer off course and become an outlier.

In the article, Rich discusses how scrapping at-will would do nothing to help Oregon workers or businesses, only push the state to the fringes of the 21st-century economy.

To read the full article, please visit The Oregonian.