Texas Supreme Court Says Workers Don't Have Rights

(The cartoon image above is from cartoonaday.com.)

If you are a rich person or own a corporation then you'll probably like Texas. You'll pay a far smaller portion of your income in taxes than other Texans, and you'll have more rights than other Texans -- at least a lot more than Texans who have to work for others to scratch out a living.

It's not the same for workers. Texas has the largest number of workers making at or below the federal minimum wage, and a larger percentage of minimum wage workers than any other state -- and most of those workers don't have any health insurance to go with their poverty wage (with more than a quarter of Texas workers not being covered with insurance). And Texas is an employment "at will" state -- meaning that your boss can fire you at any time for any reason, or for no reason at all. Neither loyalty, doing a good job, working hard, not punctuality and excellent attendance will protect a worker if a boss decides to get rid of him/her.

Texas is not the only "at will" state. But most other "at will" states have some exceptions to the rule. Exceptions like "good faith" and "fair dealing" -- which means the company must treat a worker fairly and deal with them in good faith (i.e., truthfully). But that is not the case in Texas, and the Texas Supreme Court recently made it clear that workers have no rights -- not even when the company deals unfairly with them, and in fact, outright lies to them.

Here is how mainstreet.com  reports on a recent case decided by the Texas Supreme Court regarding workers' rights (with Chief Justice Nathan Hecht writing the decision):

In 2002 E.I. du Pont de Nemours announced plans to turn some of its operations into a separate subsidiary. Most of the affected employees were under a union agreement that gave them the right to transfer within DuPont if they preferred, a decision which would have cost the company an enormous amount of money to retrain the transfers and hire their replacements.

The employees were worried that if DuPont sold the new subsidiary it would hurt both their pay and retirement funds. To convince them to work in the subsidiary instead of transferring within the company, DuPont assured its employees that it had absolutely no plans to sell the spin-off. Based on this promise almost everyone moved to the subsidiary, which a few weeks later DuPont sold to Koch Industries. Koch cut both salaries and retirement packages. DuPont had, as it turns out, been negotiating this deal the entire time.

The Texas Supreme Court sees no problem with any of this.

Writing for the court, Hecht noted that at-will employment in the state of Texas means that aworker can be fired "for good cause, bad cause or no cause at all.". . .

No fraud exception exists to at-will employment in Texas, Hecht ruled, meaning that DuPont was free to sell its subsidiary and effectively fire the entire staff without fear of consequence. The court also noted that fraud requires an element of reasonable reliance, which doesn't exist in at-will employment.Workers can't rely on any promise that involves them keeping their jobs because the employer is free to just fire them for something else instead. . .

The Texas Supreme Court held, essentially, that fraudulent inducement is immaterial in at-will employment, because either way you're out thedoor. The employer could have gotten rid of you with or without the lie, so you can't claim fraud, because the deception was irrelevant.

This shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with Texas. The Texas Supreme Court is made up entirely of Republicans, and they have a reputation of deciding cases for corporations and against workers (or consumers). This is in line with all elected Republican officials -- because the only constituencies they care about are the rich and the corporations (the ones who make the donations that keep them in office).

This is a big reason why we need to elect Democrats to state-wide office. It's time for workers to get a fair deal (and a fair wage) -- and that's just not going to happen as long as the Republicans control state government and state courts.