Just Cause Dismissal Protections in Ithaca

International visitors are sometimes shocked by the way American laws fail to protect workers. They wonder how our employment law contains a doctrine of at-will employment that says we can be fired for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason at all. This is one of the many areas of worker rights in which the U.S. is unusual, and as the City of Ithaca moves toward replacing this with Just Cause protections, it will be watched across the country.   

Many in our community will have personal experience with unfair termination. Data provided by the Tompkins County Worker Center’s Workers’ Rights Hotline shows that out of 148 phone calls about unfair dismissals from 2020 to 2025, 53 also involved harassment at work, 45 involved discrimination and 19 involved union organizing, and in many cases, retaliation for speaking up against problems at work. These numbers represent only a small fraction of the problem, as they include only workers who sought recourse and exclude many more who feel unjustly terminated but quietly moved on with their lives and careers. 

The workplace doesn’t have to be this way. Other wealthy countries have legislation that specifies procedures for dismissing workers, including notice periods, progressive dismissal procedures, grounds for dismissal, probationary periods for newly hired workers and mechanisms for enforcing the rules when employers violate them. Even here in the U.S., such procedures are commonly found in “just cause” provisions in collective agreements, which cover the 10% of workers who are union members. 

Just cause statutes in the U.S. are rare, but they do exist. At the city level, just cause protections have been passed for parking lot attendants in Philadelphia and for fast food workers and gig workers in New York City. On a larger scale, Puerto Rico and Montana also have longstanding just cause statutes. Montana is particularly interesting because employers advocated for a law after juries began awarding large sums of money to workers for unjust dismissals under various exceptions to the at-will doctrine decided by the state’s courts.   

Just cause doesn’t mean that employers can’t fire workers, they simply require employers to fire workers for valid reasons, such as misconduct and poor performance, or to lay off workers for economic reasons. The principle is that the employer must have a valid reason to dismiss workers, and workers should have recourse when they feel they have been unfairly dismissed.    

One commonly heard concern about dismissal protections is that employers will be reluctant to hire workers if they expect it to be difficult to fire them. If this were true, we would expect higher unemployment in countries with strict regulation of dismissals than in relatively lax countries like the United States. The reality is that there is no simple relationship between the strictness of dismissal protection and unemployment. In fact, several of the countries with the strictest dismissal protection legislation have lower unemployment rates than the U.S. (currently about 4%), including the Netherlands (3.7%), Germany (3.4%) and Czechia (2.8%). 

A second concern is that small businesses will have difficulty complying with just cause statutes and will disproportionately bear the associated administrative burdens. The small business sector of the United States does in fact struggle, and accounts for a much lower share of value added than in other wealthy countries. (Montana, incidentally, has one of the more robust small business sectors in terms of employment; New York’s is average.) This concern has led to calls for a small business carveout. 

Which workers would be excluded if the city excluded employees of small businesses? Using data from the Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns at the Zip code level, my team estimates that a carveout for establishments with 50 or fewer workers would affect about 34% of Ithaca’s workers overall, but fully 60% of workers in retail trade and 76% of workers in accommodation and food service. 

These are among Ithaca’s more vulnerable workers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the workers in retail are disproportionately young, female, Black, Hispanic and living in poverty. Much the same is true for restaurant and food service, according to the National Restaurant Association. Wages are relatively low, according to detailed Census Bureau data for Ithaca. In May 2024 the median wage for workers in the broad occupational category “food preparation and serving employees” was $17.63 and for “sales and related occupations” $17.40. (As of February 2025, our local living wage stands at $24.82.) Very few workers in these sectors are unionized and protected by a collective agreement. 

The City of Ithaca deserves credit for seriously considering enacting just cause employment protections. If we are serious about overcoming structural racism and sexism and empowering the most vulnerable workers, however, we should think twice before carving out small businesses. By pioneering a broad, inclusive approach to dismissal protection, Ithaca could play an important role in bringing workers’ rights in the U.S. in line with the rest of the world. 

Research support provided by Ashley Basantes, ILR ’26, and Emelin Torres, ILR ’27.

Photo Credit: Jacob Wackerhausen