The Rights of Employees and Employers

The rights of employees and employers, as well as their responsibilities, develop from expectations maintained by either group. The work agreement is an understanding with expressed or assumed terms. These terms include legal, contractual, and moral rights and ideally meet the expectations of both parties. Currently, the employment relationship is "at-will", and, unless expressed contractually, is limited to legal rights. However, restricting a work agreement to legal and contractual rights, with at-will employment, inaccurately captures assumed and moral rights. Philosophical ethics that valuate employment differently provide incite as to rights, the relationship of rights to at-will employment, and the nature of the employer-employee relationship.

First, employees maintain legal rights, of which are not subject to interpretation regardless of expectations. These rights, as written by DesJardins (2011), are "...granted to employees on the basis of legislation or judicial ruling"; they include (but are not limited to) minimum wage and equal opportunity (p.124). Second, certain expectation of rights and corresponding responsibilities exist, and, are present in the foreground of the employee-employer relationship. Expectations and desired rights actualize through an employee-employer commonality: the work agreement or contract. Additionally, the third set of rights are not expected but fundamentally deserved as human entitlements and granted through universal morals. Through the last century, expected and assumed moral and contractual rights have suffered because of employment-at-will and forced examination of legal attention.

Traditionally, employment-at-will maintained employees are free to leave a job at their discretion and no mandate restricts their choice to quit. Because at-will employment grants employees these benefits employers must also be able to terminate an employee at-will. Employment criteria outlined with a contract is not employment-at-will because it holds both employers and employees to employment commitments. This basic interpretation of the work agreement understands work as a mutual and autonomous relationship between two consenting parties, but, as Charles Muhl (2001) describes, "when an employee does not have a written employment contract and the term of employment is of indefinite duration, the employer can terminate the employee for good cause, bad cause, or no cause" (p.3). This position is parralell to the idea an employee can quit a position anytime so too an employer can walk away from an employee at anytime for good, bad, or no cause. The employer's ability to terminate employment at-will grants employers with increased advantage in the relationship.

An understanding of value lends context into the expectation of rights for employees. Several schools of philosophical ethics value work differently and empower different aspects of the relationship. The hedonistic interpretation, for example, would marginalize work as the means to gaining life's ends; or, the price we pay to acquire life's pleasures (DesJardins 2011, p.110). Work, in this interpretation, stands in the way of pursing happiness and, described by Hannah Arendt (1958), "is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of the human existence...distinctly different from all natural surroundings" (p.7). Inversely, the human fulfillment or liberal models would both agree, as written by DesJardins (2011), "...work is the primary activity through which people develop their full potential as human beings" (p.111).

How do these contradicting work values increase an employer's advantage while determining the work agreement? A student of the hedonistic interpretation would argue employer's responsibilities are limited to rights agreed upon and detailed in the work agreement. Employees earn a paycheck and work only as a means to satisfy their own happiness. Similarly, to the employer, the employee is a means to satisfy production needs (DesJardins 2011, p.111). The employee has the responsibility to negotiate expected rights contractually and include them in the work agreement; at-will employment continues so long as both sides agree. A student of the human fulfillment school would argue employers have the responsibility to provide employees a meaningful work experience with fairness and autonomy (DesJardins 2011, p.111).

Value controls what rights employees ask for, demand, or fight to earn. The hedonistic interpretation reflects traditional employment-at-will standards, whereas, at-will employees are free to bargain for rights like wage, workplace conditions, and benefits (DesJardins 2011, p.116). Understanding this model, no employee is required to accept a job or mandated to keep it if rights are unsatisfactory. From the perspective of employers, an agreement structured this way is naturally fair. However, employees willing to disregard basic rights (simply to get their paycheck and get out) undermine the equality of the employee-employers mutual agreement. This arrangement diminishes the autonomy of employees and empowers the employer. Employees accept decreasingly acceptable rights to find or maintain employment. Therefore, legal standards must protect morally