Dismissal Policies in the United States and Europe: Employment at Will Versus Just Cause

This article presents employment termination as a question of social justice. Two main competing models for legal rules governing the dismissal of individual employees are detailed: The U.S. modified Employment at Will approach and the common European Just Cause approach. A method of moral analysis is proposed for assessing the conflicting arguments behind each model. A series of questions are identified that can serve as a research program for arriving at a normative judgment concerning the relative moral merits of the competing models. © 1997 Plenum Publishing Corporation.