We’re one of the few states with both implied-contract and bad-faith codified as explicit exceptions to at-will, and we’re significantly more likely to resolve in favor of the employee than in most states because we actually mean them.

The only question is whether naysayers (usually management or people parroting what management said) convince employees that we’re strictly at-will and have no options if terminated, when we are not and often most certainly do.

Do you think the corporate expense of going through motions of PIPs for a month—and risking quiet quitting or even disgruntled employee retaliation in the meantime—would be a thing if they didn’t have to cover their own butts or risk a lawsuit they’d actually conceivably lose?

In states without these protections they generally just fire you. And I’m not even going to get into the protected class aspect where CA has many nuances, and “no reason” becomes awfully tricky to defend if challenged by the vast majority of workers who do fall within one.

So yes, realistically an employer needs a reason to safely fire you in CA.

That’s almost always quietly recognized and accommodated at our level via either a reason or a significant payoff out the door in exchange for a waiver of liability. We can sue the crap out of them and quite feasibly win if they don’t.

It’s only at the lowest level jobs where this gets completely ignored. That’s largely because employers are confident the min-wage folks aren’t going to sue them, same reason poor people get illegal leases around here that never get challenged.

Second, I never actually said we had special protection in my original post.

I said we had (among) the best protections, and that we provide the model for most other protective laws of this type in the USA. And I said it in the context that we were the high water mark for protection and even then the OP’s conjecture wouldn’t necessarily fall under it.

Think that’s all easily verifiable on your part. Not sure what else you think you’re disputing there.