I'm assuming that your statuses table has a 'name' column. Adjust as necessary.

In the Employee model:

public function fetchByStatus($status)
{
        return $this->Status->find(
                'all',
                array(
                        'conditions' => array'Status.name' => $status),
                        'recursive' => 0     // or 1
                )
        );

public function fetchByStatus($status)
{
        return $this->Status->find(
                'all',
                array(
                        'conditions' => array'Status.name' => $status),
                        'contain' => array(
                                'Employee'
                        )
                )
        );

$data = $this->Employee->fetchByStatus($status);

Note that if you might in the future include a status that is not
URL-friendly, (eg. "A Multi-word Status" it would be best to create a
slug column instead of passing the name to the controller.