New York City can become the first major US city to require employers to give workers advance notice of termination and a written explanation of their firing.

Tiffany Cabán and Tony Rosario

The harassment started when Tiffany Jade Munroe’s coworkers found out she was transgender. Then she was fired from her warehouse job with no explanation and no warning. And there was nothing she could do: In New York, it is almost always legal to fire a worker with no reason and no recourse. This is known as at-will employment.

Current Issue

You might be asking: Isn’t discrimination in hiring and firing illegal under the Civil Rights Act? It is. So why have so many New Yorkers—one in four women and one in 10 men, to be exact—endured sexual harassment at work to avoid being disciplined or fired? And if they did speak up, why were so many of them (one in seven) fired or disciplined for speaking up about workplace concerns?

What happened to Munroe is not an outlier. At-will employment allows discrimination to run rampant in the workplace. If employers don’t need to provide a legitimate reason (or any reason) for a firing and there are few mechanisms for recourse, anti-discrimination laws like the Civil Rights Act are incredibly difficult to enforce.

Luckily, there is a solution that has already been tested on the fast-food industry and is supported by 79 percent of New Yorkers: the Secure Jobs Act.

Int 909, also known as the Secure Jobs Act, would end at-will employment and expand the...

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