I should have the right to quit a job without being sued for unfairly resigning
AS AN undergraduate, I worked at a laundromat for a few months. Each Sunday I would spend 10 hours giving people tokens for the machines and doing “serviced washes”. This could be a nasty business because people occasionally dropped off clothes or bed sheets they had soiled on account of drinking too much the night before. But that is not why I quit.
I quit because I did not like the owner, who I had to deal with once or twice each Sunday. He never did anything wrong but there was something about him. He gave me the creeps. So one day I told him that the next Sunday would be my last. I did not tell him why.
It was lucky for me that I was the employee. Had my creepy employer found me equally creepy, he would have been stuck with me. Under current employment law, you can fire someone only if you have a good reason. Firing someone for being creepy would be an “unfair dismissal”.
Last week Adrian Beecroft published his report on labour market reform, commissioned by the government. He suggests abolishing the prohibition on unfair dismissal. Employers should be allowed to fire people on a whim (although with statutory compensation).
Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, doubts this would promote economic growth. He is wrong. But that need not concern us. Beecroft’s proposal needs no such economic justification. It is a simple matter of equal treatment. Why should there be such a thing as unfair dismissal when there is no such thing as unfair resignation?
When denouncing Beecroft’s proposal, Ed Miliband claimed that “countries that succeed in having a higher-skilled, higher-paid workforce are those where employers and employees show commitment to each other”.
If this mutual commitment requires employers to be constrained by unfair dismissal laws, why does it not require employees to be similarly constrained? Miliband ought to demand unfair resignation laws. You should be allowed to quit a job only if you can provide a good reason, which would not include having a better offer or disliking the boss. A boss cannot fire you just because he has a better candidate or dislikes you.
Miliband suggests no such law, of course. It would smell of indentured labour. Yet he is happy to deny employers the same liberty to extract themselves from unwanted relationships. The mutual commitment he seeks should be voluntary for employees but compulsory for employers. Why?
I suspect it is because Miliband and his ilk resemble the theocrats who wrongly want to make it harder for women to terminate their marriages than for men. They absurdly see women (employers) as treacherous creatures who will use their liberty to betray men (employees). An asymmetry in their liberty is required by an asymmetry in their virtue.
This is iniquitous nonsense — about employers as much as women
Jamie Whyte is a senior fellow of the Cobden Centre.