You're kidding yourself if you think at will employment is used to just "fire slouches no questions asked". It's a gun to your head held by your boss. One wrong step and you're on the street. It's ironic that "the land of the free" is so keen to submit its citizens to such a tyrannical workplace.
You'd make a great union organizer with fear mongering like that. I've worked in a variety of places in a variety of fields, and I've never seen that done. What's more, the times when I have seen people fired they usually get a fat severance package that ends up putting a lot more money in their pocket than otherwise.
I'm sure that there are terrible places like that, but generally speaking doing business that way is much more expensive than treating your people well. When I was in management, turnover was one of the most expensive things to have happen. In some cases the people were irreplaceable (the experience and history they had in their brains was not possible to transfer). From time to time we'd have someone that just wasn't working out, but most of the time we treated people exceptionally well so they wouldn't leave and go to the startup down the street that pays more and keeps the fridge stocked with beer.
If things really were like you say they are, I'd be supporting unionization as well. However, in a couple years of management and a dozen or so as a grunt, that has not been my experience.
If we're gonna do anecdotes here I've seen management refuse to give a 5k raise to someone when they knew replacing them was going to be 40k minimum because "no one gets more than 2%", and I've seen that multiple times.
I've also been threatened before with concerns about my "culture fit" in a meeting my boss brought me into 5 minutes after I told him I disagreed with his approach but would do it if he said so.
I've had good managers but it only takes one asshole getting Peter principled above them to neuter most of their ability to run a team well
I have seen it quite a lot in software engineering in just my 5 years in the profession, happened to myself and many friends - hell, I was even in management last time it happened to me. Many times it came down to whether the people were a part of [insert manager's] inner circle/did whatever management wanted.
The stories are all too common, even at companies that supposedly treat their employees well. At will employment is a terrible thing.
Without mechanisms to discourage unfair termination (like unions and strong law enforcement), companies can and will and do ignore the law and just fire whoever they want. The threat of being knocked around by unions and/or the government for doing it is the only thing that stops companies from firing people when they get pregnant, or when they get diagnosed with cancer, or when they get engaged to their same-sex fiance, or when they adopt a kid from a foreign country, or when they report their boss for sexual harassment.
While you're waiting for your wrongful termination/retaliation complaint to wind its way through the existing systems, you don't have a job and you aren't paying rent. It's good to have multiple layers of protection so ordinary people don't get screwed by a business operator looking to save a few dollars.
fwiw the US's current government infrastructure is absolutely miserable at enforcing labor rights laws, so that makes unions a regrettable necessity no matter how bad they are. It'd be awesome if the country was in a good enough state to make unions no longer necessary.
And once you dive in to the details, thats where life gets muddy.
I do think it's controversial that a single boss that might hate you for totally irrelevant reasons be able to fire you on a whim. Made up performance standards and the like.
And it gets more hairy because unemployment in the US (in most states) needs to be approved by your employer. That's really fucked up. If you think it helps prevent abuse of the system, I'd rather some people abuse the system and everyone get unemployment rather than people have to fight shitty employers for it.
Unemployment should be insured by the state. I've heard social workers tell me "Of course you should apply. It's your money" but I've also heard HR people tell me companies in most states have to pay out unemployment which is why they fight it so hard.
Anyone care to chime in on how unemployment generally works and who pays for it in the US?