A. An employment relationship in which either party can terminate the relationship with no liability if there was no express contract for a definite term governing the employment relationship
Listen to pronunciationLegal Definition -
At-will employment is a doctrine of American law that defines an employment relationship in which either party can terminate the relationship with no liability if there was no express contract for a definite term governing the employment relationship.
Black's Law Dictionary® Eighth Edition © 2004
Current Usage -
One of the problems in explaining the growth of at-will employment in 19th century America is that it originally sprang into existence not in the industrialized states of the North, where factory-owners were increasingly viewing workers as replaceable parts to hire and fire as they chose, but in the least industrialized states. It was the states of the South and West which were early adopters, while the big industrial states like New York and Pennsylvania came much later. This fact raises problems for what is perhaps the most widely held explanation for at-will employment, which is that it was a judge-made rule to benefit capitalist businesses at the expense of workers. The at-will employment rule is often attributed to Horace Gay Wood, who described the rule in an 1877 treatise. Over the next forty years, the rule was judicially adopted in most American states. How and why the rule spread, however, has been the subject of considerable academic debate. Explaining the Spread of At-will Employment as an Inter-Jurisdictional Race -to-the Bottom of Employment Standards, Richard Bales, Tennessee Law Review Vol. 75, No. 3, 2008