Does at-will employment entitle the employee to quit without giving any notice?

Question

Does at-will employment allow you to quit without giving notice even if your job contract requires it? If the employer can fire you for any reason except a few that amounts to discrimination then does an individual have the right to quit regardless of what the employment contract says?

Answer 1

Even if you have an actual written job contract which requires notice, you can quit anyway. Civilians who aren't employed in some paramilitary capacity have an absolute right to quit at any time, although if they have contracted to the contrary, this decision may not be completely free of legal consequences. This is a function of the prohibition of slavery or involuntary servitude in the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The inability of members of the military to quit is a recognized exception to the 13th Amendment, as is the inability to quit of certain civilians outside the Department of Defense organization in the U.S., who are part of a paramilitary organization, like U.S. Center for Disease Control field epidemiologists.

If someone quits when they do have a actual contract which requires notice, the employer would be limited to money damages. Unless a specific penalty is specified in the contract as liquidated damages, the employer would have to prove that breaching the agreement by not giving notice caused the employer to incur actual provable damages (e.g., money spent hiring a temp during the notice period). This would usually be very modest compared to the amount of money it would cost to sue, and it would be quite unusual for an employment contract to have an attorney fee shifting provision.

Also, not everything that looks like a contract necessarily is a contract. It isn't unusual for an employee manual, for example, to expressly state somewhere that it is non-binding, or to emphasize your "at will" status while merely saying that notice for some time period is "expected." One would want to review the purported employment contract very closely with this issue in mind.

At will employment simply means that your employer can fire you at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. . . . At the same time, it also means that you, the employee, can quit your job at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. But what if your employer required you to give two weeks’ notice before you quit; does that mean you’re not an at will employee? In general, if your employer requires two weeks’ notice before you quit but reserves the right to fire you without notice, then your employment is likely still at will. This means if you quit without notice, you may be violating your employer’s policy, but not any law or contract.

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Furthermore, if the contract both says that you are an "at will" employee and also provides a notice period, as the quoted material above suggests, the contract might be found by a court to be internally contradictory or ambiguous, and interpreted in the non-drafting employee's favor to deny relief to the employer.

Answer 2

Both employer and employee can agree to take on contractual obligations that are consistent with any statutory minimums or constraints. Texas law does not preclude either side taking on an obligation to provide notice.

At-will employment generally only refers to the lack of statutory dismissal protection for the employee.

In an at-will state, an employer can take on contractual obligations to only fire for cause, or to provide notice, etc. So can the employee.

Of course, that is subject to ordinary common-law limits on contracts or statutory invalidity of certain terms. But the general status of being in an at-will state does not imply any particular restriction. For instance, Texas law does not preclude either side taking on an obligation to provide notice.

As ohwilleke correctly observes, employees always have the freedom to breach. A court would not order the employee to work when they have not given the required notice. The remedy would be money.