The Economic Crisis and At Will Employment

I've had 2 people that I know, that are among the 1 Million people that have lost their jobs in the last 2 months, lose their jobs recently. Like many of the stories that are coming out of this time period, they have been let go without real remediation offered, and on ridiculous accusations or loosely trumped up stories where they were not allowed to even file their side of the story. One person was accused of hanging out too much when he took too long to use the restroom, supposedly on multiple occasions. Another was let go after completing all of the tasks that his supervisor had put on a task list for him, but complaining to another employee that he was concerned because the type of computer he likes to support is being removed from the lab that he likes to support the most. This was seen as a "bad attitude." I'm sorry, but he completed the work right?! Shouldn't you only be able to be fired from a job when you become a danger or don't do your work consistently and after being given a chance to improve yourself with charted results? Isn't telling people how to act, think, walk, talk, and dress fascism?
It got me to thinking. Yes the at-will contract allows either party to terminate the contract at any point for any reason, but is that what workers really want? It seems very heavily biased to protect the employer. Even though these contracts are legal in different ways in different states, doesn't that obviously look better for the employer than the employee, and can't anyone reasonable see the potential for the out of control abuse of the 1st Amendment here? Let's take the scenario where a company's higher up(s), the person(s) that would re-mediate a dispute, has a policy that they will not keep contact from a lower level employee confidential. This is a common policy that many higher ups use, especially those with prior military experience. This is often not written down anywhere so employees may not even know about it. Once a lower level employee complains, the supervisor of that employee receives a folder with all of the e-mails, etc. from the lower level employee in them. Now in a structure like the military, someone can simply be reassigned and prove that they were not guilty of what they were accused of, but in the real world, especially at a large company, school, etc., this gives the supervisor the chance to bully the employee in private, force them to resign, threaten them with termination, or even terminate them, because let's face it the employee doesn't have any rights. This means that the supervisor can easily stop an employee from causing them any trouble by talking to others, going to their boss, etc. unless the place itself has policies that stop this which most don't think are worth their time to create or vary widely from place to place. Sure we want to be free, but in the modern world people need their jobs. It's not like the old days when the government was giving away land and people could live on it, work it, build a home on it, and not have to have a job if something went wrong. Some people end up with their lives ruined when they lose their job. Sure some people do need to be fired, but don't all employees in the US deserve re-mediation through an independent third party before they are? I will close by mentioning an awful story that I read about a sick man who went into work to say goodbye to his friends, his boss then called him into his office and let him go, citing something about job performance. Well people that are very ill often work a little bit slower than most. It should be obvious that what happened here is that he was going to cost the company a lot of money because he was sick. So they cooked up a story to get rid of him. Remember they don't have to have a good reason, just a reason. In the end we need unions again, but we also need the government to protect workers. Look at what IBM did, or just outsourcing in general. I know it's scary. People think that they can't have rights because that will mean no jobs at all, but there are alternative to letting the very wealthy screw everyone. Employee owned companies are a great one, unions are good too. We have been scared into thinking that we can't ask for rights because that will lead to no jobs, but by not having rights we are losing jobs anyway, and no one can really plan their futures. It is not socialist or undemocratic to want basic worker protections. It is just fair and will lead to a more productive America. The last note I want to make is that in some states if the work is part-time, at-will, and the contract is written up as temporary it can be terminated for any reason. Meaning the only right that the employee gets is that they can say that they quit, they should be smart enough to put it in writing, but they may not even receive unemployment benefits. Some states do not require such contacts, when they are terminated, to end in a pink slip. So the person, no matter how we may personally feel about the matter, now has no job, and no income. Again, is this really what we want in America? Educated people on the streets? This is a bad economy. Companies want to cut costs and employees that have a sense of individualism will probably be some of the first to go for taking to long to take a dump, which translates to loafing in corporate terms. I'll leave you to imagine how all other kinds of simple things can be translated into offenses by corporations. Think about it you only have to be late once to get written up for it. Guess you'll have to get axed for that.