New legislation would make it harder to fire employees
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June 21, 2007
Making it difficult to fire people sounds like a good thing to do. And it could be politically popular. After all, there are more employees than employers.
But making it hard to fire people also has the effect of lessening the chances that they will be hired. If adding someone to the payroll is fraught with legal risk, employers will be cautious about hiring.
That's the last thing Michigan needs right now. Last month, Michigan experienced the largest decline in jobs of all the states. And it suffered the largest decline in jobs on a year-to-year basis. Its unemployment rate, at 6.9 percent, remains more than two percentage points above the national unemployment rate of 4.5 percent.
Nevertheless, the Michigan House of Representatives is holding hearings on a package of bills that make it tougher to fire people or decline to hire them based on their credit history, physical fitness or "body type," family medical problems or indulgence in a legal activity in off hours, such as smoking.
Weyco, an Okemos firm, gained national notoriety a few years ago when it required its employees to refrain from smoking, even at home. The workers were a given a period of time during which they were to quit, and a stop-smoking program was created. Some employees were ultimately fired after they failed to pass a nicotine test.
As well-intentioned as these bills may be, they are a bad idea. They would create new hiring and firing standards and complicate Michigan's legal status as an "at-will" state, which means both employers and employees can change the employment relationship at will unless there is a legal contract binding the two.
Adding more legal complications to the hiring or firing process is not a good way to boost employment.
It should be noted that employers are already barred from hiring discrimination on the basis of religion, race, national origin, sex, height, weight, marital status or familial status by the state's Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act of 1976.
Rather than adopting restrictive legislation for employers, state law should encourage firms through tax credits to offer fitness programs, stop-smoking seminars and other assistance to encourage employees to be healthy. To the extent that the law doesn't now do so, it should allow health insurance companies to offer beneficiaries lower premiums or co-pays if they participate in such programs.
Offering rewards rather than punishment may have the effect of producing a healthier work force and avoid the legal complications implicit in this package of bills.
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