In my line of work there are a lot of layoffs currently taking place, but it’s surprisingly hard to get fired, short of some grave ethical violation or outright crime. I once knew a guy who had a drug problem and was gone for a month, but still given a second chance. It was only after he blew that second chance that he got fired.
How about where you work?
I work in a call center. Very easy to get laid-off but also very easy to get re-hired for the same job.
I’m a public librarian - we work for the gubmint, so it’s pretty hard to get fired.
I work in a call center where they seem to find just about any excuse to put you in Final Warning. I’d say it’s really easy to get fired, but most of the people who do so are doing something wrong and aren’t smart enough to stop doing it when the first couple of warnings come around. Or they think that because a lot of other people are engaged in “you can be fired for doing this” behavior and haven’t been, that they’re in the clear. What they don’t see is how often those other people have been warned for it. Until they’re fired.
We have a very clear code of conduct. Minor infringements will earn you a warning. Serious infractions result in immediate termination of employment.
I’m a pilot. We have three checks per year where our knowledge and skills are assessed. Two are in a simulator covering emergencies and one is on a normal line flight and covers normal operations. If we fail a check we are given a second chance (can’t work in the meantime so the second chance will be soon after the first one.) If we fail the second one we’re out. Last year we lost two pilots this way.
Apart from failing a check it is difficult to get fired, you’d have to do something stupid like intentionally break the rules. We lost a pilot last year because he was being stupid and we’ve lost a pilot in the past because he was defrauding the company.
I’m a teacher. 
I’m the only site manager for my area for Meals on Wheels. I’d think it would be pretty difficult to get fired from such an easy job.
I’m a unionized civil servant. It would be really difficult to fire me.
I’m an electronic engineer. In this job, if you’re good at what you do, especially if you know how to do things that no one else at the company understands, you can get away with just about anything.
I’ve known engineers who had significant drug and alcohol problems who weren’t fired.
My boss has said to me in no uncertain terms, “we pay you to figure out how to do stuff, not necessarily to spend 40 hours a week doing it.”
On the other hand, if you’re really incompetent, they’ll find a reason to let you go
I’m a waiter, and not contracted at that. It’s really easy to fire someone in my position, generally so long as you’ve got an excuse to fire the person it’s all good.
There’s been a few incompetent members of staff where they’ve been fired at the first excuse - one guy was lighting matches and just letting them burn out in the staff room - just fucking around, but because they (the management) wanted to get rid they fired him on grounds of health and safety.
However there’s been plenty of times where I’ve been late, been caught having unauthorised smoke breaks, or ‘vandalising’ (I glued every item on the maintenance guys desk to the desk - it was a part of an ongoing trading of pranks, not malicious or anything) for example, where it’s been overlooked because I’m good at my job and well liked.
So while it’s theoretically piss easy to get fired the reality is it rarely happens unless they really really want to get rid of you.
ETA: I’m in a similar position to PatriotGrrrl it would seem.
I’m a teacher/adminstrator at a private academy, and it is both easy and difficult to be fired here. For teachers, we have plenty of veterans who’ve been here forever yet are mediocre performers. As long as you show up on time and teach according to structure without pissing off too many students to the point of them leaving, you’re fine. Teachers who get involved in any way, directly or indirectly, with drugs and/or assault charges inside or outside of the classroom would get fired on the spot.
Like the OP, my company has periodic layoffs to get rid of (mostly) middle management and well-established deadbeats, but otherwise it’s damn hard to get outright fired. In fact, I was brought in as a quasi-replacement for a team member who knew how to work the system and had wrangled a staggering leave of absence over the past few years with zero productivity in trade for it. She was on the payroll for at least three months after I got hired but I never met her once - the company was literally paying her to stay home while she looked for another job.
Another person who works under our immediate manager not only has a serious drug problem, he’s extremely emotionally unstable and actively at war with his soon-to-be ex. He loves to bray about the latter issue out loud to his coworkers regardless of who else is around and whether any of them want to hear it or not. He survived the last major layoff with flying colors because he’s a hard worker when he wants to be.
In my last line of work we were advertising in the paper for walk-in-off-the-street, $80,000/year-to-start jobs and we still couldn’t fill the positions because the job was very demanding and required a very particular resolve and innate skill set to be successful. Also, there was a labour shortage.
I was very good and indispensable at this job and it would have been very difficult for me to get fired, barring gross misconduct.
I work in the environmental industry and it’s pretty hard to get fired unless a person does something pretty bad, or just doesn’t work (can’t have people being unbillable). Laid off is a different story. Unfortunately my company added its share (a couple of hundred people) to the recent 10’s of thousands of layoffs nationwide. Sniff :(.
Some of them were offered early retirements, or cutting back hours/category and once the economy improves a lot of those people will be rehired.
But for some, at the time the layoffs were announced, it was delicately implied that they were ones who fell more under the “dead wood” category.
First off, lay-offs or reduction-in-force actions are a completely different animal than firings or with-cause terminations.
At least in Corporate America, terminations require significant documentation in order to keep from losing much of the corporations assests in court.
Lay-offs are not as restrictive, and while you still need to be careful, do not require the case building that terminations do.
Such is the Corporate HR world.
It’s very hard to get fired, but it’s not my line of work (IT) so much as my country’s labour laws.
Easy Peasy. A manager feels you’re causing him to exert too much effort and you’re unemployed. To their credit, though, at least now they’re trying to make the decision sober. Better than before…
Non-unionised civil servant in UK central government, I’m also technically registered as disabled (which shouldn’t be a factor but you damn well know it’s going to be in trying to construct a case against me). Getting rid of me would be extremely hard if I didn’t want to go, short of me committing gross misconduct or assaulting one of my colleagues I really can’t imagine the circumstances under which they’d get rid of me. Of course there is a process for dismissing someone on the grounds of poor performance but it’s so long and torturous that it’s barely ever used. As my performance is good (or at the very least has been adequate in periods when I’ve been unwell and no so able to do my job) there are no grounds for poor performance dismissal for me.
Central government has been in the process of reducing its numbers for the last few years which would technically constitute layoffs, but about 95% of those have been carried out through either voluntary redundancy or simply not replacing those who leave.
I’ve probably got one of the safest jobs in the country.
I work for a university, and my boss once told me that I would have to kill someone in order to lose my job. So my job is safe. Safer than my boss in fact…