In the midst of a much-discussed affordability crisis, Americans’ economic woes have been compounded by a quieter but equally alarming crisis of job insecurity. Whether fueled by fears about the impact of AI and automation, tariff-related economic disruption, or a generally weakening job market, workers’ confidence in their job security and their ability to find new employment is plummeting.
This environment of insecurity is a threat to all working families because it undermines worker power—including workers’ ability to demand fair treatment and claim their fair share of economic gains. People who fear for their jobs are far more vulnerable to discrimination, unsafe working conditions, wage theft, and other mistreatment because they are far less likely to speak up for their rights or act collectively to improve wages and working conditions.
In ordinary times—for the past nine decades—workers have had a place they can turn to protect their right to engage in self-advocacy on the job. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) protects workers’ right to form and join a union and engage in collective action. But in recent months it has become clear that the NLRB faces a number of threats to its independence and operations that could compromise its ability to protect these vital workplace rights. And even in the best of times, the NLRB’s processes have been plagued by delays and resource constraints that undermine the agency’s ability to protect workers from mistreatment.
In the face of these challenges, many advocates are suggesting that the best approach to promote worker power is to tackle the job insecurity crisis more directly. They are championing initiatives that make it harder for employers to fire workers unfairly, known as “just cause” laws. These efforts can be advanced at the state and local level, and may have advantages over other state and local efforts to regulate labor relations because they are unlikely to be struck down by courts on the grounds that they are preempted by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
But the question arises—if we want to build worker power by protecting job security, how do we effectively structure these “just cause” laws to ensure that they are really empowering workers to have a voice on the job and laying a foundation for stronger worker empowerment structures such as union organizing and collective bargaining?
What is just cause?
The United States is an outlier among industrialized countries in maintaining “at-will” employment, meaning that nonunion workers can be fired without being given a good reason—or any reason at all. Most other advanced economies have some form of just cause employment laws—which require employers to provide workers with notice and an opportunity to correct performance issues; a fair process and a sufficient reason when they are terminated; and, often, severance pay. These laws also provide workers who are fired unfairly with some sort of process—whether filing an administrative complaint, or a private lawsuit, or both—that they can use to contest an unfair termination and potentially obtain reinstatement, back pay, and sometimes fines and penalties or other damages.
Currently, Montana is the only state in the United States that has relatively universal just cause protections, and those protections are notably weak, having been originally enacted to limit employers’ financial liability in wrongful termination lawsuits. But now worker advocates are enthusiastically embracing more robust, pro-worker initiatives to enact just cause protections at the state and local level and for specific sectors or industries. In recent years, groups of workers have won stronger protections against unfair firings in several cities and states, including parking lot attendants in Philadelphia, app-based workers and fast food employees in New York City, and ridesharing drivers in Seattle (later extended to all of the State of Washington). And there are active campaigns for universal just cause protections in Illinois, Oregon, New York City, and Ithaca, New York.
It’s not surprising that just cause campaigns are taking off. Proposals to limit unfair firings are extremely popular across the country and across the political spectrum. In a 2021 survey, 71 percent of voters in battleground congressional districts—including 67 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of Democrats—expressed support for such legislation. Indeed, the need for just cause laws resonates personally with many people. Survey data shows that nearly half of workers report that they have at some point in their careers been fired for no reason or a bad reason, often without warning.
How can just cause laws lay the foundation for building worker power?
The popularity of recent just cause initiatives alone is not enough to guarantee that their passage will adequately protect and empower workers; furthermore, providing individual workers with a path to pursue financial compensation for an unfair firing is also too modest a goal for just cause initiatives. Rather, these laws should also be viewed as tools to lay the groundwork for unionization and other more robust worker power structures.
By definition, an employer lacks just cause to terminate a worker if that termination was not, in fact, based on performance issues or economic necessity, but was in retaliation for trying to organize a union or act collectively to improve working conditions. Just cause laws could provide an alternative path that workers fired for organizing or other workplace advocacy could use to seek reinstatement and compensation, and to repair the damage to organizing campaigns caused by retaliatory firings.
But if just cause laws are to play a role in supporting collective action and organizing activity, these laws must be designed and implemented with the following three key characteristics in mind.
Just cause laws must provide a quick and realistic path for unfairly fired workers to be reinstated.
Quick reinstatement of someone who is fired for advocacy or organizing efforts is the most important way to limit the damage to an organizing campaign, sending a strong message to workers that their employer’s power is not unlimited, and they have some recourse if their employer treats them unfairly. But the notorious delays in the NLRB’s processes have limited the extent to which reinstatement of fired workers can effectively restore vitality to organizing campaigns or other self-advocacy efforts.
Agency data shows that in 2024 it took an average of 168 days for the agency to investigate a charge and reach a determination of merit. While the vast majority of these cases settle, when cases are tried before an administrative law judge and appealed to the NLRB, the adjudicative process can add many months, or even years, to the process. Even in situations where the NLRB takes the relatively rare step of going to court on an expedited basis to seek an injunction reinstating fired workers, the process of seeking that relief takes an average of ten months. This sluggish process delays justice for workers and can doom workplace organizing and advocacy campaigns.
Early data from the implementation of protections for New York City fast food workers suggests that a just cause law administered through state or local enforcement agencies could potentially provide a quicker process—at least for states and localities that have an established and well-resourced agency to oversee the law’s implementation. The median time from the start of an investigation to resolution of a fast food worker’s just cause complaint in New York City in 2024 was 118 days, or just under four months. Cases seeking reinstatement may be more complex—in one anecdotal example, a union activist secured reinstatement under the New York City fast food law seven months after his unfair termination—but still potentially quicker than the NLRB injunction process.
It’s noteworthy that reinstatements seem to be the exception rather than the rule in the implementation of New York City’s law. The New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection that administers the law seems most inclined to settle cases (rather than issue an administrative decision or seek a decision in court) and generally obtains monetary recovery for workers in settlements rather than pushing for reinstatement (though it is difficult to learn from statistics how many unfairly fired workers simply declined to pursue reinstatement and sought only monetary relief).
Recommendation: For a just cause law to successfully support worker collective action and organizing there must be an enforcement structure that allows for rapid worker reinstatement, and enforcement staff must aggressively pursue reinstatement as a presumptive remedy, particularly in cases where a terminated worker might have been engaged in organizing or other collective action.
Just cause laws must provide strong enough remedies to change employer behavior and discourage retaliation and union-busting.
One of the fundamental flaws in our current federal labor law system is that there are very weak penalties for misconduct. The NLRB cannot assess any fines or penalties, and can provide only “make-whole” relief to victims of unfair labor practices—basically, providing back pay and other compensation intended to restore the affected workers to the position they would have been in absent the unfair labor practice. There are no punitive damages or other remedies available that would serve to punish misconduct or deter bad behavior. This is a huge weakness in the NLRA because there’s little incentive for employers to comply with the law. Even if the system works correctly, all a lawbreaking employer has to do when they have committed an unfair labor practice is restore the workplace and the affected workers to the way things would have been had the employer not broken the law in the first place—usually, years after-the-fact. Thus, employers facing a union organizing campaign or other worker collective action often engage in deliberate campaigns of unlawful retaliatory activity, knowing that they can violate workers’ rights with little consequence.
Structured and enforced properly, state and local just cause laws could provide a more effective mechanism to change employers’ incentives and behaviors. Several of the state and local just cause laws currently on the books provide for some sort of fines or liquidated damages. However, these penalties are generally relatively modest (ranging between $500 and $2,000 per violation), and it is unclear how regularly they are assessed. For example, in implementing its fast food worker just cause protections in 2024, New York City closed twenty-three investigations but assessed only $8,360 in penalties.
Many other types of labor and employment laws on the books provide more robust remedial regimes. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, for example, employers who commit violations of minimum wage and overtime laws can be required to pay back pay plus an equal amount in liquidated damages for willful violations and can be assessed civil monetary penalties of up to $2,515 per violation for willful or repeated violations. Some states go even further in enforcing wage and hour laws, providing for treble damages, compensatory and punitive damages, civil penalties, and even criminal penalties for willful or egregious violations. Research shows that the availability of fines, penalties, and damages beyond back pay can be an effective deterrent, encouraging employers to comply with the law.
Recommendation: In addition to back pay for affected workers, an effective just cause law should provide for significant civil penalties and compensatory, liquidated, and/or punitive damages to more effectively deter employers from firing workers who try to form a union or stand up for their rights on the job.
Just cause laws must allow workers to easily learn about and invoke their rights under the law.
It is critically important that workers who seek to engage in union organizing or other collective workplace action know what their rights are, and how to protect them. This gives workers a foundation of security that can embolden workplace advocacy efforts. The employer community has been particularly vigorous in opposing federal agency efforts to inform workers about their organizing and collective bargaining rights. The Chamber of Commerce successfully sued the NLRB in 2012, killing the agency’s effort to require employers to post a notice informing workers of their rights under the NRLA. While the agency itself has undertaken significant know-your-rights education efforts in recent years, there are signs that new leadership may be backing away from its commitment to this work in the current administration.
Just cause laws can provide a viable alternative path to help build worker power, but only if workers know they exist, and know how to invoke their protections. Perhaps not surprisingly, given their relatively recent origins, the new state and local just cause laws on the books thus far seem to be woefully underutilized. For example, while the New York City Comptroller estimates that there were 76,291 people employed in the fast food industry in the city at the end of 2024, there were only fifty-two just cause complaints filed with the New York City Office of Consumer and Worker Protection, only twenty-nine of which resulted in an investigation.
Recommendation: States and localities that pass just cause laws must be aggressive in their outreach efforts to ensure that workers know they are protected from unfair firings and specifically inform workers that this protection extends to retaliatory terminations of those engaged in union organizing or other concerted workplace activity.
Looking Ahead
In these precarious economic times, when workers are increasingly worried about job security, it is an ideal political moment to push just cause laws to the front and center of the progressive policy agenda. Protecting workers from being fired unfairly is, most obviously, an essential way to improve economic security for individual workers and their families. But these laws should also properly be viewed not as an end unto themselves, but as a tool to build more collective power in the workplace—providing strong anti-retaliation protections that will build a foundation of job security to enable bold collective action. With federal labor law protections increasingly under threat, states and localities should seize the moment and step in to protect workers from being unfairly fired for using their voice on the job.
Tags: labor laws, american jobs, job opportunity
Building Worker Power on a Foundation of Job Security
In the midst of a much-discussed affordability crisis, Americans’ economic woes have been compounded by a quieter but equally alarming crisis of job insecurity. Whether fueled by fears about the impact of AI and automation, tariff-related economic disruption, or a generally weakening job market, workers’ confidence in their job security and their ability to find new employment is plummeting.
This environment of insecurity is a threat to all working families because it undermines worker power—including workers’ ability to demand fair treatment and claim their fair share of economic gains. People who fear for their jobs are far more vulnerable to discrimination, unsafe working conditions, wage theft, and other mistreatment because they are far less likely to speak up for their rights or act collectively to improve wages and working conditions.
In ordinary times—for the past nine decades—workers have had a place they can turn to protect their right to engage in self-advocacy on the job. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) protects workers’ right to form and join a union and engage in collective action. But in recent months it has become clear that the NLRB faces a number of threats to its independence and operations that could compromise its ability to protect these vital workplace rights. And even in the best of times, the NLRB’s processes have been plagued by delays and resource constraints that undermine the agency’s ability to protect workers from mistreatment.
In the face of these challenges, many advocates are suggesting that the best approach to promote worker power is to tackle the job insecurity crisis more directly. They are championing initiatives that make it harder for employers to fire workers unfairly, known as “just cause” laws. These efforts can be advanced at the state and local level, and may have advantages over other state and local efforts to regulate labor relations because they are unlikely to be struck down by courts on the grounds that they are preempted by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
But the question arises—if we want to build worker power by protecting job security, how do we effectively structure these “just cause” laws to ensure that they are really empowering workers to have a voice on the job and laying a foundation for stronger worker empowerment structures such as union organizing and collective bargaining?
What is just cause?
The United States is an outlier among industrialized countries in maintaining “at-will” employment, meaning that nonunion workers can be fired without being given a good reason—or any reason at all. Most other advanced economies have some form of just cause employment laws—which require employers to provide workers with notice and an opportunity to correct performance issues; a fair process and a sufficient reason when they are terminated; and, often, severance pay. These laws also provide workers who are fired unfairly with some sort of process—whether filing an administrative complaint, or a private lawsuit, or both—that they can use to contest an unfair termination and potentially obtain reinstatement, back pay, and sometimes fines and penalties or other damages.
Currently, Montana is the only state in the United States that has relatively universal just cause protections, and those protections are notably weak, having been originally enacted to limit employers’ financial liability in wrongful termination lawsuits. But now worker advocates are enthusiastically embracing more robust, pro-worker initiatives to enact just cause protections at the state and local level and for specific sectors or industries. In recent years, groups of workers have won stronger protections against unfair firings in several cities and states, including parking lot attendants in Philadelphia, app-based workers and fast food employees in New York City, and ridesharing drivers in Seattle (later extended to all of the State of Washington). And there are active campaigns for universal just cause protections in Illinois, Oregon, New York City, and Ithaca, New York.
It’s not surprising that just cause campaigns are taking off. Proposals to limit unfair firings are extremely popular across the country and across the political spectrum. In a 2021 survey, 71 percent of voters in battleground congressional districts—including 67 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of Democrats—expressed support for such legislation. Indeed, the need for just cause laws resonates personally with many people. Survey data shows that nearly half of workers report that they have at some point in their careers been fired for no reason or a bad reason, often without warning.
How can just cause laws lay the foundation for building worker power?
The popularity of recent just cause initiatives alone is not enough to guarantee that their passage will adequately protect and empower workers; furthermore, providing individual workers with a path to pursue financial compensation for an unfair firing is also too modest a goal for just cause initiatives. Rather, these laws should also be viewed as tools to lay the groundwork for unionization and other more robust worker power structures.
By definition, an employer lacks just cause to terminate a worker if that termination was not, in fact, based on performance issues or economic necessity, but was in retaliation for trying to organize a union or act collectively to improve working conditions. Just cause laws could provide an alternative path that workers fired for organizing or other workplace advocacy could use to seek reinstatement and compensation, and to repair the damage to organizing campaigns caused by retaliatory firings.
But if just cause laws are to play a role in supporting collective action and organizing activity, these laws must be designed and implemented with the following three key characteristics in mind.
Just cause laws must provide a quick and realistic path for unfairly fired workers to be reinstated.
Quick reinstatement of someone who is fired for advocacy or organizing efforts is the most important way to limit the damage to an organizing campaign, sending a strong message to workers that their employer’s power is not unlimited, and they have some recourse if their employer treats them unfairly. But the notorious delays in the NLRB’s processes have limited the extent to which reinstatement of fired workers can effectively restore vitality to organizing campaigns or other self-advocacy efforts.
Agency data shows that in 2024 it took an average of 168 days for the agency to investigate a charge and reach a determination of merit. While the vast majority of these cases settle, when cases are tried before an administrative law judge and appealed to the NLRB, the adjudicative process can add many months, or even years, to the process. Even in situations where the NLRB takes the relatively rare step of going to court on an expedited basis to seek an injunction reinstating fired workers, the process of seeking that relief takes an average of ten months. This sluggish process delays justice for workers and can doom workplace organizing and advocacy campaigns.
Early data from the implementation of protections for New York City fast food workers suggests that a just cause law administered through state or local enforcement agencies could potentially provide a quicker process—at least for states and localities that have an established and well-resourced agency to oversee the law’s implementation. The median time from the start of an investigation to resolution of a fast food worker’s just cause complaint in New York City in 2024 was 118 days, or just under four months. Cases seeking reinstatement may be more complex—in one anecdotal example, a union activist secured reinstatement under the New York City fast food law seven months after his unfair termination—but still potentially quicker than the NLRB injunction process.
It’s noteworthy that reinstatements seem to be the exception rather than the rule in the implementation of New York City’s law. The New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection that administers the law seems most inclined to settle cases (rather than issue an administrative decision or seek a decision in court) and generally obtains monetary recovery for workers in settlements rather than pushing for reinstatement (though it is difficult to learn from statistics how many unfairly fired workers simply declined to pursue reinstatement and sought only monetary relief).
Recommendation: For a just cause law to successfully support worker collective action and organizing there must be an enforcement structure that allows for rapid worker reinstatement, and enforcement staff must aggressively pursue reinstatement as a presumptive remedy, particularly in cases where a terminated worker might have been engaged in organizing or other collective action.
Just cause laws must provide strong enough remedies to change employer behavior and discourage retaliation and union-busting.
One of the fundamental flaws in our current federal labor law system is that there are very weak penalties for misconduct. The NLRB cannot assess any fines or penalties, and can provide only “make-whole” relief to victims of unfair labor practices—basically, providing back pay and other compensation intended to restore the affected workers to the position they would have been in absent the unfair labor practice. There are no punitive damages or other remedies available that would serve to punish misconduct or deter bad behavior. This is a huge weakness in the NLRA because there’s little incentive for employers to comply with the law. Even if the system works correctly, all a lawbreaking employer has to do when they have committed an unfair labor practice is restore the workplace and the affected workers to the way things would have been had the employer not broken the law in the first place—usually, years after-the-fact. Thus, employers facing a union organizing campaign or other worker collective action often engage in deliberate campaigns of unlawful retaliatory activity, knowing that they can violate workers’ rights with little consequence.
Structured and enforced properly, state and local just cause laws could provide a more effective mechanism to change employers’ incentives and behaviors. Several of the state and local just cause laws currently on the books provide for some sort of fines or liquidated damages. However, these penalties are generally relatively modest (ranging between $500 and $2,000 per violation), and it is unclear how regularly they are assessed. For example, in implementing its fast food worker just cause protections in 2024, New York City closed twenty-three investigations but assessed only $8,360 in penalties.
Many other types of labor and employment laws on the books provide more robust remedial regimes. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, for example, employers who commit violations of minimum wage and overtime laws can be required to pay back pay plus an equal amount in liquidated damages for willful violations and can be assessed civil monetary penalties of up to $2,515 per violation for willful or repeated violations. Some states go even further in enforcing wage and hour laws, providing for treble damages, compensatory and punitive damages, civil penalties, and even criminal penalties for willful or egregious violations. Research shows that the availability of fines, penalties, and damages beyond back pay can be an effective deterrent, encouraging employers to comply with the law.
Recommendation: In addition to back pay for affected workers, an effective just cause law should provide for significant civil penalties and compensatory, liquidated, and/or punitive damages to more effectively deter employers from firing workers who try to form a union or stand up for their rights on the job.
Just cause laws must allow workers to easily learn about and invoke their rights under the law.
It is critically important that workers who seek to engage in union organizing or other collective workplace action know what their rights are, and how to protect them. This gives workers a foundation of security that can embolden workplace advocacy efforts. The employer community has been particularly vigorous in opposing federal agency efforts to inform workers about their organizing and collective bargaining rights. The Chamber of Commerce successfully sued the NLRB in 2012, killing the agency’s effort to require employers to post a notice informing workers of their rights under the NRLA. While the agency itself has undertaken significant know-your-rights education efforts in recent years, there are signs that new leadership may be backing away from its commitment to this work in the current administration.
Just cause laws can provide a viable alternative path to help build worker power, but only if workers know they exist, and know how to invoke their protections. Perhaps not surprisingly, given their relatively recent origins, the new state and local just cause laws on the books thus far seem to be woefully underutilized. For example, while the New York City Comptroller estimates that there were 76,291 people employed in the fast food industry in the city at the end of 2024, there were only fifty-two just cause complaints filed with the New York City Office of Consumer and Worker Protection, only twenty-nine of which resulted in an investigation.
Recommendation: States and localities that pass just cause laws must be aggressive in their outreach efforts to ensure that workers know they are protected from unfair firings and specifically inform workers that this protection extends to retaliatory terminations of those engaged in union organizing or other concerted workplace activity.
Looking Ahead
In these precarious economic times, when workers are increasingly worried about job security, it is an ideal political moment to push just cause laws to the front and center of the progressive policy agenda. Protecting workers from being fired unfairly is, most obviously, an essential way to improve economic security for individual workers and their families. But these laws should also properly be viewed not as an end unto themselves, but as a tool to build more collective power in the workplace—providing strong anti-retaliation protections that will build a foundation of job security to enable bold collective action. With federal labor law protections increasingly under threat, states and localities should seize the moment and step in to protect workers from being unfairly fired for using their voice on the job.
Tags: labor laws, american jobs, job opportunity