Same thing happened to a buddy of mine when the software company he worked for was purchased. The first thing the new owners did was move HQ from California to Texas; they told all the employees, "Move to Texas or you're losing your job." My friend moved. The company rewarded him by cutting his salary in half. He moved back to California in less than a year.
It can work well for example if the relocation is to somewhere you would have wanted to move to anyway, and now you get the company to pay for it. It works less well if you're going somewhere you have no other interest in.
Right. New company basically advertises their character by making the ultimatim in the first place. You already know you won't be treated like a human, since you're already not.
"For cause" isn't relevant here. The point is that whoever doesn't want to move will be terminated, which is perfectly legal.
Walmart is betting that a big chunk of its employees in places like Portland OR aren't going to move to Bentonville, AR, and then it can terminate them and have an effective layoff that doesn't look like a layoff. Pretty safe bet.
I mean, as someone who just made almost that exact move... (and not even into the relatively blue by comparison Bentonville area) I think more people might be willing to make the move than you'd think. I mean, it's probably still under 50%. But that area of AR isn't too bad.
Leaning on the stereotypes - I regularly saw more confederate flags and 'lets go brandon' type stuff in the Portland metro area than I have in AR (and I've spent a fair bit of time here) and I've been met with minimal grief here in spite of being the weird dude in the area with an electric car and shoulder length purple hair. Yes, Harrison still has their billboards that are pro white pride radio but there's other places in the state.
I'm a full time remote person but my move here was prompted by a combination of finding a place here that met our criteria and being nearer to my other half's family.
I am not a lawyer either, but we can deduce logically that Walmart's lawyers approved it, so it's cool.
If companies are "allowed" to lay people off, then why not this? I'm pretty sure this is within the boundaries of "at will employment". You'd have to show some kind of civil rights violation.
Companies don't have to show cause to fire anyone. That's a cover your ass situation. This ass-covering makes sense with more than half of the US population now falling into some kind of protected class.
Ironically, here in the United States, they have everyone distracted with race wars and gender ID while workers' rights are still nonexistent.
That's why corporations love Corporate Black History Month and Corporate LGBTQ Month so much. They get to virtue signal that they don't discriminate while continuing to rob everyone blind.
That's exactly what AT&T was doing right before the pandemic, different groups were being assigned to specific offices and if you weren't willing to relocate to where your group was being moved to you would (if you were lucky) get laid off but many were simply let go for refusing to relocate without any kind of package. They ended up outsourcing about 1/4 of their IT dept to IBM in 2019 after they had done about 7 rounds of layoffs due to geographic consolidation.
If the goal was to get rid of mostly older (40+) year old employees who had families and didn't want to move, sure. Since the pandemic they have allowed most people to work remote, some are on a hybrid 1-3 days in the office schedule and they are supposedly planning on trying to tell everyone to start coming to the office full time in April. They lost a lot of elderly employees at the end of 2022 due to retirement plan changes that encouraged many to retire early and they're probably about to do another big layoff in March. They still haven't returned to a geo-centralized skill strategy. AT&T has been unloading real-estate since before the pandemic, they are consolidating into 6 data centers down the dozens they currently have. If they get a bunch of stealth layoffs out of the deal, they're quite happy with that.
You absolutely can, especially with at will employment laws. There are very few things that actually stop a layoff or firing... a strong union is one thing that can though.
You don't have to fire them. Some will quit because fuck that, and others will cave under the pressure and acquiesce or quit later. And maybe you can fire them, I don't know.