Skip to content

Tuesday, Jun. 14, 2022

Do federal laws protect employees from being fired for protesting?

Jacob Alabab-Moser, Gigafact
no

There is no federal law that explicitly bars employers from firing their employees for protesting.

The vast majority of American workers are at-will, meaning they can be fired for almost any reason. Exceptions include discrimination due to an employee's "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin," as stipulated by the Civil Rights Act.

The First Amendment only prevents the federal government from interfering with free speech. It does not prevent private companies and employers from restricting political speech.

In the absence of federal legislation, several states have enacted laws protecting employees from being fired for lawful "political activities." These include California, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, Oregon and Wyoming.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

See all fact briefs

Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.