Employment Law

Too cold to work

Seven machinists went home one winter morning because their shop was too cold to work in, and by nine o’clock the company had fired them all. It was January 5, 1959, in Baltimore, with high winds and a low of 11 degrees. The oil furnace that heated the Washington Aluminum Company’s machine shop had broken down the night before. Just before the 7:30 starting buzzer, a machinist named Caron went into the foreman’s office to warm up and found it as cold as the shop. When some of the other men walked past the window huddled together, the foreman said that if they had any guts, they would go home. Caron carried the remark back to them, and after a short talk, he and six others left together.

The seven had no union, and they had broken a plant rule against leaving work without the foreman’s permission. Most workers can be fired for less. Yet the National Labor Relations Board ordered the company to reinstate all seven and make up their lost pay, and in 1962 the Supreme Court agreed. Why was this firing unlawful when so many others are not, and who decides? The decision you pull from the Board’s database answers those questions for one real dispute, and your job is to see whether three AI models can find those answers.

Any reason, or none

Florida is an at-will state. When a job has no fixed term, either side may end it at any time, and the employer needs no reason. Carl DeMarco learned how far that goes. He worked as a laborer in a Publix warehouse. According to his complaint, which Publix did not dispute, glass from an exploding container injured the eye of his two-year-old daughter. She had been shopping with her mother at a Publix store. Publix’s insurer offered $200 to settle. DeMarco turned it down and sued Publix for his daughter. A Publix vice president then told him to drop the suit or lose his job. He kept the suit and lost the job.

The courts held that Publix owed him nothing. Because the job had no fixed term, the Third District Court of Appeal ruled, Publix could end it “for any reason,” including the one DeMarco alleged. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed in 1980 and adopted that reasoning (DeMarco v. Publix Super Mkts., Inc., 384 So. 2d 1253 (Fla. 1980) (opens in a new tab)). Two justices dissented. They would have let him sue for damages to protect his daughter’s access to the courts.

The Florida Supreme Court restated the rule in 2026 and spelled out what it means. A worker fired from an at-will job in Florida has a claim only if a contract or a statute creates an exception (Gessner v. S. Co., No. SC2024-1835 (Fla. May 28, 2026) (opens in a new tab)). The public-policy exception that many states recognize has never been part of Florida law.

Two of Florida’s own exceptions show how specific the statutes are. An employer may not fire a worker for claiming workers’ compensation (section 440.205). And Florida’s private-sector whistleblower law reaches employers with ten or more employees. Under section 448.102 (opens in a new tab), they may not fire a worker who objects to, or refuses to join, a practice that violates a law, rule, or regulation. In Gessner, the court held that the worker must prove the practice actually violates the law. A reasonable belief that it does is not enough.

A firing that breaks a statute like these, state or federal, or a promise in an employment contract, is a wrongful termination, at-will job or not. Many of these cases turn on why the employer acted, and an employer seldom admits a forbidden reason. So courts test the reason it does give. In a federal discrimination case, once the worker makes an initial showing, the employer must “articulate some legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason” for its decision (McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, 411 U.S. 792 (1973) (opens in a new tab)). The worker then gets a fair chance to show that the stated reason is a pretext, a cover for the real one.

What the statutes protect

Federal statutes supply many of the exceptions, and they protect employees. So the first question is whether the worker is one. A worker who is truly an independent contractor, in business for herself, falls outside the statutes in this section. The label in the contract does not settle it. A delivery driver who drives the company’s van on the company’s routes and schedule, and may not take other customers, looks like an employee whatever the contract calls her. Under the federal wage law, the question is economic reality: does the worker depend on the company for her living, or is she in business for herself?

Title VII bars an employer from firing, refusing to hire, or otherwise discriminating against a worker because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It also bars retaliation against a worker who opposes discrimination or takes part in an investigation. It reaches employers with fifteen or more employees, and a worker who wants to sue must first file a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Florida’s Civil Rights Act, in chapter 760, covers the same grounds and adds others, including marital status.

The Americans with Disabilities Act reaches the same employers. It protects a qualified individual, someone who can do the essential functions of the job with or without a reasonable accommodation. Congress amended it in 2008 so that disability is read broadly. The EEOC’s guide to the law (opens in a new tab) notes that a condition need not be long-term, permanent, or severe to count. An accommodation might be a schedule change, telework, or leave for treatment. The employer must provide one unless it would cause undue hardship. It may choose among the options that work, but it may not refuse one just because it costs something.

The Fair Labor Standards Act sets the floor for pay: at least $7.25 an hour. Unless a worker is exempt, hours past forty in a workweek earn time and a half. Florida’s Constitution sets a higher minimum wage (opens in a new tab) and adjusts it every year, and a Florida worker is owed whichever is higher. An employer that shortchanges workers under the federal law owes the unpaid wages plus an equal amount as liquidated damages. Coworkers can join one another’s suit by filing written consents.

What follows a worker out the door

The at-will rule runs in both directions. An employee may quit at any time and take her skills to a competitor or open her own shop. An employer that wants a say in what she does next has to bargain for it while she still works there, usually in a noncompete agreement.

Florida’s general statute on these agreements, section 542.335 (opens in a new tab), leans toward enforcing them. The restraint must be in a writing the employee signed. The employer must also prove a legitimate business interest, such as trade secrets, confidential business information, substantial relationships with specific customers, or extraordinary training. And the restraint must be reasonably necessary to protect that interest. Unless it protects trade secrets, a restraint on a former employee of six months or less is presumed reasonable in time, and one longer than two years is presumed unreasonable. A court may not refuse to enforce it because of the hardship it would cause the employee, and a restraint that reaches too far is trimmed, not thrown out.

Since 2025, a second statute has gone further for high earners. The CHOICE Act (opens in a new tab) covers a worker paid more than twice the annual mean wage in the county where the employer has its principal place of business. The employer must follow the Act’s steps, such as giving the worker at least seven days to review the agreement and written notice of the right to a lawyer. If it does, a noncompete of up to four years is enforceable by its terms. When the employer applies, the court must preliminarily enjoin the worker from working for anyone else during the noncompete period. The court may modify or dissolve that order only on clear and convincing proof of one of three listed grounds, such as that the new work is not similar. An agreement outside the Act is still judged under section 542.335.

Acting together

Back in Baltimore, the machinists had no union, but the National Labor Relations Act protects more than union activity. Section 7 of the Act (opens in a new tab) gives employees the right to engage in “concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” Under section 8(a)(1), an employer that interferes with that right, for example by firing workers for exercising it, commits an unfair labor practice.

The court of appeals had sided with the company. The men made no demand before they left, it reasoned, so their walkout was not protected. The Supreme Court reversed (NLRB v. Wash. Aluminum Co., 370 U.S. 9 (1962) (opens in a new tab)). With no union and no representative of any kind, the Court said, the seven had only themselves to speak for them, and walking out together was how they spoke. One of them had testified that they left thinking “maybe we could get some heat brought into the plant that way.” The walkout was concerted activity over a condition of their work. The plant rule could not justify the firings, because an employer may not punish workers for activity the Act protects.

The protection has limits. The Court listed concerted activity that is unlawful, violent, or in breach of contract as unprotected. The Board’s explanation of concerted activity (opens in a new tab) adds statements that are egregiously offensive or knowingly and maliciously false. The Act also leaves out some workers entirely, among them supervisors, independent contractors, farm workers, and people employed in domestic service in a home.

The National Labor Relations Board runs a system of its own for these disputes, with a prosecutor and judges. A worker or union files a charge at a regional office, generally within six months of the conduct. The region investigates. If the charge has merit and the case does not settle, the regional director issues a complaint on behalf of the General Counsel, the agency’s prosecutor. An administrative law judge then hears the case near where the dispute arose, in a hearing the decisions call a trial. The judge’s decision finds the facts, applies the law, and ends with a remedy and a recommended order.

Any party can take the case to the Board in Washington by filing exceptions. If no one does, the judge’s recommended order becomes the Board’s order. Either way, a judge’s decision is not precedent for other cases unless the Board adopts it after reviewing exceptions. The Board cannot enforce its own orders. It asks a federal court of appeals to enforce them, and a losing party can ask those courts for review. The machinists’ case took that route, from the Board to the Fourth Circuit to the Supreme Court.

The machinists’ case turned on whether the walkout was protected; no one disputed why the men were fired. Many discharge cases turn instead on motive: the employer says it fired a worker for a lawful reason, and the worker says the real reason was protected activity. For those cases, judges apply a test the Board set out in 1980 in Wright Line. The General Counsel must prove that the protected activity was a substantial or motivating factor in the firing. The employer can still win by proving it would have fired the worker anyway, for a lawful reason.

The Supreme Court approved that test in the case of a bus driver named Sam Santillo. In March 1979, Santillo talked with the Teamsters about organizing his fellow drivers and handed out authorization cards. His supervisor heard about it, called him two-faced, and promised to get even. Days later Santillo was fired. The supervisor said the reasons were that he left his keys in the bus and took unauthorized breaks.

The administrative law judge did not accept either reason. Drivers commonly left their keys in the buses, the judge found, and the supervisor had not known about Santillo’s habit when he decided to fire him. Coffee breaks were a normal practice the company tolerated, and no one had ever warned Santillo about his. The company had also skipped its usual practice of three written warnings before firing a driver. The Board agreed, the First Circuit refused to enforce the order, and the Supreme Court reversed and upheld the Wright Line test (NLRB v. Transp. Mgmt. Corp., 462 U.S. 393 (1983) (opens in a new tab)). An employer that acts partly from a motive the statute forbids, the Court reasoned, should bear the risk that the lawful and unlawful motives cannot be separated.

That is the work a judge’s decision does. It weighs the testimony, decides whom to believe, and tests the employer’s stated reason against how the employer treated everyone else. When a judge finds that a firing violated the Act, the usual remedy is the one the machinists won, reinstatement with back pay. A notice goes up at the workplace too, telling employees that the Board found the employer broke federal labor law.

Reading your decision

Most judges’ decisions follow a standard plan. The statement of the case says who filed the charge, when, and what the complaint alleges. The findings of fact say what happened and whom the judge believed. The analysis names the legal standard, which in a firing over protected activity is often Wright Line. The conclusions of law, the remedy, and the order come last, usually with the notice to employees attached. Before any AI model sees the decision, find those parts yourself. The database page (opens in a new tab) also shows whether the Board has acted on the decision or it is still pending.

Build your benchmarks first, with the three prompts that open the activity, and only then give the decision to each model. In the machinists’ case, the trial examiner, as the Board’s judges were called until 1972, believed the men’s testimony about why they left, and the Board relied on it. See whether any of your three models can point to the finding your decision rests on.