Apologies in advance for centering a global space around the US, but the little bit I've been reading and even smaller bit I have been commenting in this subreddit, it seems like there is a conversation that happens a LOT:
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Employee lives in a “right to work” state
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Cruddy/awful employer does something illegal
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Employee vents about the unethical illegal behavior
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commenter says “go sue!” or “give them hell!” etc.
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Employee points out #1
And that's that and we are all sad.
But while it is true that an employer can fire an employee for no reason in those states… it's also true that an employee who believes they were fired for an illegal reason can bring that to (OSHA I believe but I don't know anything about federal and local labor board organization or specifically the order of operations in who to email and call) and the employee has to prove the termination wasn't for that illegal reason.
A smart jackass will cover their tracks and develop a paper trail and do everything they can to make their termination plausible, sure. But we also don't want to do their work for them. We don't want to assume the employee is totally entirely fucked and can do nothing from the start when we don't have that data or expertise to make that call. That's unhelpful for us as a group/class/whatever it is called.
[Side bar: if an individual does have the money and time to push back in any way, we (gently I hope) encourage them to do so. If they don't have that money and time then the rest of us either need to put up that money or shut up if we aren't walking what we are talking, you know? Being pushy but unhelpful isn't, well, helpful.]
So, yea, suing is usually not on the table unless the situation is especially egregious. And there are huge financial barriers contributing to that. I acknowledge this. But calling up OSHA or whatever, that is still doable for some people. And (IMO) it is really important for people who can spend the time and money on this stuff to follow through on that pushback. Maybe enough people can change the social norms and assumptions here but at the very least we just don't want it getting worse and people to be even more hopeless.
I don't work at any labor board and I'm sure I know absolutely nothing about how those cases work, but it really sucks to see people give up and not even call those people up to ask them about it. We don't know what are slam dunk cases, what are still worth fighting for, and what are (sadly) not going anywhere but need to be logged so when we can get improvements, it's part of the tidal wave that gets us there. THEY know all this information and we gotta bring this stuff to them to find out what it actually looks like before giving up on any kind of justice or retribution or pushback at all.
Again, I understand that no group is a monolith and everyone has their struggles so I can't expect everyone to be able to do everything. But I think it would be nice to have a clear and concise version of this whole situation written somewhere to be referred to so we don't have to type this all out over and over again for a bunch of problems that clearly keep happening all over the place (within the US at least.)
Thanks for taking the time to read me ramble. I'm more of a numbers than letters kind of person so I hope somebody over on this side of things can take this and make something much better out of it because I sure don't stay on task when it comes to big topics like this.