You can be eligible for unemployment benefits if you "voluntarily" quit due to a significant change in working conditions, but as far as I know, that's about your only option if your employment was "at-will."
And you have to quit basically right when the change happens, or very soon thereafter. If you try to live with it for 6 months and ultimately decide it's untenable, they're going to say, "Well you lived with it for six months. It obviously wasn't that untenable. So no benefits for you."
(Source: Spent years adjudicating unemployment claims at the initial application and appeals levels.)
So if your boss decides to cut your pay by 50% suddenly, that's essentially the same thing with the same options for the employee? Live with it or quit?
There's not contractual obligation on the part of the employer to actually do what they say they will?
Its not that unions are somehow pure wonderful organizations. They fail like any human-run org for the similar reasons.
The unions are required because only a union is "big enough" to stand up to a company, and to sit down at the big negotiating table. You, an individual, can easily just be told to go pound sand.
If an individual tries to go against this Farmers Insurance takesies-backsies of remote work, your recourses are to: follow their orders, quit, or refuse and make them fire you. As an individual, you have NO power.
At a union level, those choices are more numerous and back-breaking to the company. They can't just fire all workers. Minor sabotage in the forms of work stoppage and slowage can also significantly hurt a company engaged in this sort of crap. And the union is "big enough" to have a sit-down and negotiation to resolve this.
You're never going to get a honest sit-down and negotiation as an individual when the CEO wants something. But that union will.
More or less, yes. Most companies don't do 50% pay cuts even under extreme circumstances, preferring to go ahead and lay people off, but many companies will do things like wage freezes or temporary pay reductions to try to avoid layoffs.
True but contracts aren't everything, just ask everyone else who are the other way. Their contract says they should be working in a specific location, but they'd rather be at home.
The issue with this approach is that you are basically arguing that WFH changes in 2020 due to pandemic were legally problematic too.
I’d be willing to bet that any employment offers made since the 2020 WFH blitz for the legally savvy organizations have stipulations that the employer can control the working location, and of course the employee can choose to leave if the location changes in a way unfavorable to them.
More than once in my career I have been at a company where the office location changed. I didn’t get to say “no, you can’t move my office because this is where the office was when you hired me”.
It seems like part of the contract is being broken if you were hired for a remote job and then told you have to come into the office.
At will employment obviously means you can fire them, but can you just change the terms of the contract at will?
"I will pay you $79,000 for this position," followed by pay of $25,000 is obviously not legal. Where is the line?