What Does Just Cause Termination Have to Do with Utah Unemployment?

If Utah employers can let employees go for any legal reason with or without notice, why does it matter when a person applies for unemployment compensation if he or she was let go “for cause” or not?

Utah, like the many other states, is an at-will employment state—meaning that an employer may dismiss “‘employees at-will … for good cause, for no cause, or even for cause morally wrong, without being thereby guilty of legal wrong.’” At-will employment “reinforce[d] turn-of-the-[20th]-century ideas concerning laissez-faire economics and freedom to contract.”

The Utah Employment Security Act, however, serves different policy considerations. It “is designed to provide a ‘cushion from the shocks and rigors of unemployment.’ Although the Act is not designed to provide benefits to those who will not work, it is to be liberally construed and administered to assist those who are attached to the work force and need a bridge between jobs.”

This means that, while an employer has few limitations in dismissing or discharging an employee under Utah’s at-will doctrine, if an employer dismisses an employee for anything other than what is statutorily defined as “just cause”—which does not include causes such as “inefficiency or failure of good performance as the result of inability or incapacity, inadvertences, isolated instances of ordinary negligence, or good-faith errors in judgment or decisions’”—that employee will be entitled to receive unemployment benefits.