Most of the people who already answered above answered incorrectly. One person who gave a correct answer was:
twofish-quant said:
In the USA, most employment is at will and as long as it isn't illegal, the company can force you to do pretty much anything as a condition of employment. If the company has a rule that says that you must show up to work wearing a chicken suit or be fired, they can.
If you live in a fire-at-will state, which most states are, the employer may NOT fire you for certain specific reasons (race, religion, national origin, handicap, etc.), but they may fire you for no apparent reason at all, or for any spontaneously invented reason.
Suppose the boss wanted to fire you for a disallowed reason, say, having discovered that you have a certain racial origin. The boss could get in trouble with the law for admitting to that. Therefore, the boss would say something like "I'm firing you because I didn't like the expression on your face" or "your tone of voice didn't seem respectful" or "you don't seem to smile often enough" or "on one day, a few years ago, your shirt seemed to be wrinkled." If the employee who gets fired wants to challenge it, the employee has the entire burden to prove that the real reason for the firing was something on the list of disallowed reasons, which would mean going into court and claiming to have the power to read other people's minds.
It's a common practice for companies to manipulate employee evaluations to produce excuses to fire people. These evaluations are usually written to be intangible and not measurable, such as "individual doesn't display enough creativity." I know of one employer who calls in the targeted worker and tells him or her "this is your new job description for the coming year: figure out some way to do twice the work in half the time", and then, when the worker can't do it, the worker is fired for refusal to follow one's job description.
A company can also use layoffs to get around the discrimination laws. A company that I'm familiar with wanted to get rid of much of its workforce due to the average age, and replace the workers with younger people. It would be illegal if they said that directly. So what they did, to have exactly the same effect, was announce a new rule that laid off workers may never be rehired, then announced a decision to shrink the business and laid off the workers, and then a few days after that they announced a decision to enlarge the business again and hired new college graduates.
So as for your question about can the company "keep me from owning", that depends on why you mean by "keep me from." They can't kidnap you, or put you in chains, or beat you up. What they can do is dismiss you from employment, for any reason, at any time.
Some people here will deny what I have said. If they deny it, then they don't have the amount of experience that I have with the organized labor movement and its struggles to establish workers' rights.
