this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
239 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
59534 readers
3195 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You could just do what other parts of the world do and prohibit firing without cause, and introduce some rules for how businesses are allowed to lay off when the need to reduce headcount arises. Last-in/first-out could be one such rule - it's what we have in Sweden.
Exactly. This isn't an unsolved problem. It's just that labour power and unions are weak in the US. Businesses get the laws tailored to them, and workers get screwed.
It's fine and normal if a business miscalculates and has to lay people off. But, when that happens it should be obvious to everyone that it wasn't the worker who screwed up, and the worker should have the option to get their job back if things turn around.
What made this video so disgusting wasn't the fact she was losing her job. It's that they tried to pretend that she was being fired because her performance wasn't up to par when that was an obvious lie.
Last in first out, wasn't that what was claimed in the actual video. Didn't she bring up being there for only a month? And even then, that was time worked during the holidays. So the person just finished onboarding and was let go immediately after. Sounds like her specific case follows what they do in Sweden. In the video she asked again and again what she did and was met with a wall of we will talk about it later. I'm on her side wholeheartedly but let's not try to normalize this behavior with laws. A new job should be a time for celebration and excitement.
I wouldn't say that this was truly a last in/first out-situation, on account of them claiming the firing was performance-related. Any quality of last in/first out is also probably accidental in this case, if my understanding of tech company layoffs is more or less correct.
You're right, if they'd have admitted it was because she was li/fo then she could have claimed employment benefits which they have to pay towards I believe. They were criticising her performance to avoid that.
That is was what they claimed, you are right. However that felt more like a boilerplate response meant to avoid a payout. Again, she asked for clarity on what that meant but never got a real response. I'm sure even now she didn't get an answer. She was an account executive at the end of the year, not a greeter at Walmart. She was not on a PIP and was exceeding her KPIs, according to the video. Even her boss was shocked. If they had real data to prove their point, they would have brought it up then and there. Instead she got crickets. The whole thing reminds of the King of the Hill episode where Dale gets hired to fire people.