Yes. California is an at-will state. The employer can terminate at any time for any reason. Unless they have a contract, they can do anything they want.
Do employees not have some sort of contract? Surely you'd want to have some level of notice - it's no good for employers for people to quit with no notice either.
Employment in the US is largely at will. Only in large layoffs do workers have any rights to notification, and large layoffs are rare, so most US employees expect there’s zero right to notification.
This is a shock to folks in Europe, but when people quit here they generally give two weeks notice, and no one expects you to do any work in those two weeks.
This equilibrium is bad for labor, but very good for capital. Not shockingly, the US is a magnet for capital! The macro term of art for this is “a dynamic labor market”, and capitalists love it.
If you’re wealthy in the US, it leads to extremely generous compensation for in demand functions. But it’s also correlated with a weak safety net.
I guess I just naively assumed there'd still be some level of notice required. It seems that you can literally walk out of a job in an at-will state with no recourse.
It's surprising to me because in the UK every employment relationship is governed by a contract that stipulates some level of notice. We don't have employment protections until 2 years of service - essentially after 2 years getting rid of an employee becomes quite onerous - but even from day 1 you have a notice period (which works both ways).
I'm surprised companies in California don't get their employees to sign some sort of contracted notice - it can be incredibly disruptive to lose a key employee overnight! It feels like companies here want every longer notice periods - mine is currently 3 months and I'm not even sure why. It works both ways though - even if my employer wanted to get rid of me, they'd have to pay me for 3 months.
