Just because you can fire someone for no reason doesn't mean you can fire someone for any reason.

Or to put it another way: just because you can fire someone by rolling dice doesn't mean you can fire someone for being black.

Nothing stopping you from firing someone for being black, then claiming you rolled a dice, however.

IANAL but I believe juries tend to be biased towards the plaintiff (terminated employee) in wrongful termination suits simply because there are far more low level employees in the jury pool than there are managers, not to mention how expensive it can be to litigate. Hence all the CYA measures like performance improvement plans and so on.

You can claim that you rolled dice, but that won't be sufficient - the distrimination law explicitly puts the burden of proof on the employer to demonstrate that the firing was because of a non-discriminatory reason, so if it's just the employer asserting that it was because of dice and the employee asserting that it was because of race, then the employer automatically loses unless they have convincing evidence to state their case.

That's part of why you'd often see lots of HR bureaucracy regarding firing process, documenting infractions, performance improvement plans, etc also in states where technically you can be fired without a reason.

Attorney here who has handled a number of similar wrongful termination claims here. You can try this, but you better have a lot of good, clear documentation backing up your non-discriminatory reason for the firing which, if you're just making it up as a pretense, you probably don't. And if it's found that you did fire for a discriminatory reason and you attempted to lie about that fact, you're opening yourself to a world of hurt.

If they make the job impossible or dangerous, it might at least count as "constructive termination", so they'd be eligible for unemployment.

True but the list of reasons that allow you to fire someone without paying unemployment is limited.

They're trying to avoid paying out unemployment by saying he failed to show up for a shift but even sans-COVID firing after one absence is abnormal.

Why would firing make someone ineligible for unemployment? That seems silly

Quitting your job makes you ineligible for unemployment -- that's why the company called it their "resignation"

Why does it matter to the company if you claim unemployment benefits?

Unemployment taxes for a company scale based on historical claims from that company. More Unemployment Benefits paid out = more future UI taxes paid by that employer. It's meant to be a self-funding system.

To expand on what phonon said -- UI tax rate is company specific and depends, in part, on how much UI is paid out to company's employees.

That sounds a nightmare of bureaucracy to calculate!

I mean, that’s how most insurance premiums work.