No, that’s not what I mean. I guess by brutal I mean “Allowing employers to dump people for a wide variety of transgressions, with very little in the way of a social safety net.” Granted, most of the cases cited here have been reasonable enough. Even The Gaspode’s layoff wasn’t his idea, and yet can you imagine … are you even INTERESTED in imagining … the feelings of those 15 people and their families who lost work through no fault of their own? Especially in today’s non-growth job market …
Hers, of course, barring infirmity (I’m assuming you’re against just shooting those who are unable to work through no fautl of their own). That does not mean the rest of us are free to be brutal jerks, does it? Or does it?
Depends on what you mean by “responsible.” I’m sure there’s no legal responsibility unless it’s written into her contract. Generally, the principles of good management call on an employer to investigate what’s making an employee fuck up before discarding them like so much used tissue paper. And the principles of being a decent human being require this as well. I realize that some people believe that simple humanity has no place in the working world or the marketplace. I disagree with them.
Cryin’ baby jeebus, ivylass, I don’t think I described handholding but a reasonable attempt to find out what’s making someone fuck up. Love your copout, by the way, “It’s not my JOOOOOOB!” Hey, maybe making the world a better place is everybody’s job, and maybe it starts in your immediate vicinity. Like, with co-workers who are having problems.
Maybe it’s a tad more brutal than it has to be, y’know? Though I agree that no one will look out for me like I do.
It sounds like you did the sort of stuff I recommended. But I gotta tell you, I’ve been in situations where asshole employees who drove everyone else nuts got terminated, and still, I felt for them. And those who were gonna have to put up with them in their next job. Always kinda hoped they’d find a job that would work for them.
No, not at all- Lord knows I’m a sociopath who takes delight in the misery of the cattle considered my “fellow humans”. I am a Republican after all.
Or, one could know that I was laid off on three seperate occasions by companies going into Chapter 11, once in 1996 (not so bad), once in 2002 (bad), and once in 2003 (sucked royal rocks).
So, I’m a brutal jerk if I don’t care why someone is unable to live up to job expectations like coming in on time, and am uninterested in spending company money (which could otherwise go into, say, pay raises or bonuses or keeping the company afloat for another year so I don’t have to make massive layoffs) to investigate the deep root cause of it?
How’s about a little fire, Strawman? Oooh, I’m melting, melting! What a world, what a world…
Simple humanity has plenty of place in the workplace. However, spending company time and money to ‘help’ a worker who can’t arrive to work on time is well beyond the call of duty for any company. What possible excuse could there be that wouldn’t be solved by “leave home earlier”, or “get a job that’s more convenient to your schedule”?
I agree. Furthermore, it’s not the company’s responsibility to hand hold. Sure, it makes good financial sense to train people on tasks, but if you marketed yourself as able to do something, the ethical responsibility is on them for lying, not the employer if they are fired.
Let’s put it this way, EvilCaptor: let’s say you hire a contractor to work on your house. You lay out your expectations and accept their estimate.
What if the contractor (or associated persons) shows up constantly late, causing the work to take longer? What if this meant you couldn’t take a vacation, or you had to take more days off your own work?
What if the contractor shows up, fiddles around, but doesn’t seem to actually know how to do the job?
What if the contractor shows up to work on your house while drunk?
What if you catch the contractor stealing your personal possessions?
Is it now your responsibility to teach the contractor how to do their job? Will you do nothing if they don’t show up on time? Will you give them second chances after you caught them with grandma’s jewelry in your pocket?
Does it really matter, ethically speaking, if you stop your contract with them – even if that’s money that they need for themselves or their family, or if it hurts their feelings?
Employment is the same thing – more protected by certain laws, perhaps, but in the end it’s a matter of providing services for money and/or other benefits. It makes good business sense to try to give employees second chances, but I don’t think it’s unethical to fire someone with or without a warning for doing or not doing something (provided they had been notified or had reason to understand their behavior or performance was unacceptable).
Nobody is owed a free ride – no matter if they’re working for an individual, a small business, a corporation, or the government. You are there to work. For the record, I’ve fired many people (dozens a year – I do work in an industry known for a great deal of turnover, though) and it’s always the same schtick – they believe that I’m a bad person for doing MY job, which is to make sure things get done and that everyone’s doing their part. They feel that they’re owed a free ride. It wouldn’t be okay for me to ask them to do more work because someone else didn’t show up, but for their circumstances, I’m a drill sergeant who is “mean” to them.
Nearly universally, they won’t reciprocate with the same treatment that they demand. They want time off because of their own needs on little to no notice, but if the business needs overtime, they won’t stay to pitch in. If I ask them for work, they’ll drag their feet and I’ll have to remind them about six times, but if they’re waiting on something from me (like a time off request, or an answer to a question that I have to research), they get huffy if it’s done anything short of instantaneously. It’s a “me first” attitude that expects that the company, since it’s quite large, has endless money and we’re just greedy for not paying them twice what we do or actually expecting them to show up regularly rather than at their own personal convenience.
If someone is “downsized,” I will give them all the sympathy I can. But in the case of incompetence? No way. I got enough to do keeping my own socks pulled up without trying to make sure everyone has pulled-up socks too.
If Touchy Feely Company puts up with Joe Slacker at the expense of Billy Wonderboy, Billy Wonderboy is eventually going to say, “The hell with this,” and go work for Appreciative Company. Eventually, the only employees Touchy Feely Company will have are Joe Slackers, while Billy Wonderboys are making good money and getting corner offices at employers who don’t put up with crap from incompetent employees.
It’s a morale issue. Good employees are hard to find, and you don’t want to lose them to the competition because you’re too busy trying to find out why the slackers are calling in sick every Friday, taking three hour lunches, and doing half-assed work that everyone else fixes.
You know, EC, I live in a country that has those kind of safety nets you seem to describe. It still doesn’t work and people losing their jobs, for whatever reason, is still brutal. The laws regulating how you can fire an employee make it quite expensive, meaning that firing someone over incompetence might cost a severene package of up to twelve months’ pay. If you want to get rid of someone, due to cutbacks, the principle is “last in, first out” meaning that cutbacks lead to younger and better educated workers get laid off, while those nearing retirement gets to stay on. Breaking the “last in, first out” rule can cost up to 24 months’ pay, if a person has been employed for more than five years.
The end result?
More and more people are working temp jobs, or there are time limited contracts, renewed every six months. This means it’s a lot harder for people to get mortgages, buy a car or whatever. Companies are wary about employing people, since it might cost them a fortune to get rid of them later.
So far, nobody who’s posted here has come close to what you are complaining about. Give your complaints a rest.
I’ve been laid off before at the ripe old age of 19. It sucks, but I got back up and found another job instead of going to the self-pity card. Self-pity doesn’t pay well.
Those are the kind of people who are inheirantly assholes, no matter where they work, where they play and where they roost. The only persons that need to make changes are the assholes themselves, not everyone else. That’s great that you feel for them and all, but don’t expect society to bow to them. I know from previous posts that you are intolerant of asshole employers…which is fine by me, but asshole employees should be viewed no differently, IMHO.
Bricker, I think you were completely justified in firing this person. Like someone else said upthread, she fired herself; you just handled the paperwork.
But I don’t understand why you regard plaigarism as her offense here. Every environment I’ve been in, where documents are produced, people re-use big chunks of similar documents, making changes where appropriate. Nobody thinks anything of it, and there’s no reason why anyone should.
I’m glad you fired her ass, but because she represented nonwork as work, and tried to pass off a pile of crap as a finished product. But plagiarism? I don’t get it.
Apologies if anyone else pointed this out, but if she used another vendor’s white paper without attribution, then that vendor would have grounds to sue for misappropriation of their intellectual property, yes? In which case showing that you fired the person responsible could be the thing that saves the firm’s butt.
I can’t abide people who think that because something is “on the internet” it’s public property and they can do as they please with it, including representing it as their own work. It’s on the same level as checking a book out of the library, pasting your name on the cover and claiming you wrote it, except it’s easier to get away with.
And as others have pointed out, stealing your client’s work and trying to sell it back to the client makes her too stupid to live, as well as dishonest.
If we had a similar work in our document library, and she used it, was forthright abotu where it came from, and accurately reported the amount of time she’d spent, we wouldn’t be at this impass. She would likely be back hard at work, because in this case the requirement is unique enough that no pre-existing work would cover it, so she’d have to do it over, but she wouldn’t have been fired.
Her offense was, among other things, claiming to have authored the work in question. Now, I suppose that runs part and parcel with her false claim of time spent on the document. She wanted to show three weeks’ worth of effort, so she offered up a document that would have taken about three weeks to write and claimed it was hers. I think the problem of plagiarism and time fraud are intertwined.
Yes and no. Documents produced by the government are not protected by copyright. But the white paper that formed the bulk of her submission is, I’m sure, copyrighted, although permission to distribute it appears to have been given by the authors. But I’m sure that permission didn’t extend to removing the authors’ names and substituting your own.
She had an excuse that she needed to get her baby half-brother to day care in the morning. We found out later, through various channels, that this was not the case, her step-mother was taking the boy to day care and this chick just liked to sleep in.
I didn’t mean to hijack Bricker’s thread, my apologies. I just needed clarification on Evil Captor’s stand. Plagarism is the same as stealing, and in any event, the OP girl didn’t do the job she was supposed to do.
Sure, but my company is literally my company, a sole proprietorship. And the “funny” part is me laughing at what a shitty job I do in the boss role. I think harassment may be a strong word. If I choose not to talk to someone, is that harassment? If I give everyone a raise and a bonus except for one person who deserves neither, is that harassment?
Sorry to hear about that. I have been laid off three times in my life. It sucked every time it happened. It seems that we’ve taken widely different lessons from our experiences, however.
Pretty much.
Also, I don’t see how asking an employee, “Why are you coming in late? What can you do to fix that?” or “Why are you having difficulty learning to do the job?” will bankrupt you.
Lack of transportation, difficulties due to traffic (not all traffic problems can be solved by “leaving for work earlier” in urban areas, y’know), family responsibilities (such as seeing kids off to school) etc. I’m not surprised you don’t know these things … sounds like you don’t WANT to know.
When it first happened, I’d ask them what the problem is and how it could be corrected, and if it isn’t corrected, I’d find me another contractor. But I wouldn’t just fire them offhand.
Apples and oranges my friend. You’re talking about a contractor who is hired with the understanding that they know how to do the job, versus a person who has to be trained on the job. Different situation, y’know. That’s why, when I worked as an employment counselor, I told people, “Sure, lie your ass off on your resume, if you can cover the lie. If you can program in ASP, claim ASP programming experience, even if all you did was teach yourself at the library. But if you can’t program in ASP, don’t claim it, because your employer can fire you for that sort of misrepresentation.”
If someone is hired with the understanding that they will learn on the job and they have difficulties, an attempt should be made to find out why and help them if possible. Good management, good humanistics.
Warning, followed by dismissal if it happens again. Some companies have alcohol-treatment programs for employees with such problems. Maybe they know something you don’t.
What if I catch a contractor wearing a clown suit and fucking my wife? What if I catch a contractor building a machine to destroy the sun? Getting far afield from helping an employee with problems here, arent’ we?
I would recognize the brutality of what I’m doing, even though I had to do it. I wouldn’t sugar-coat it in my mind like some people around here apparently do.
I don’t think it’s unethical. I think it’s brutal. If there were a decent social safety net it wouldn’t be, but there’s not, so it is. The consequences of being fired are devastating to some people and families, especially in hard-to-find career-type jobs. Something like retail, less so in terms of finding more work, except that the consequences of having to survive on a sub-living-wage are their own kind of brutal.
Jeebus. Where did I say that? Do me the courtesy of responding to my actual arguments.
Not knowing the particulars of the instances you cite, I can’t comment except to say, how do you expect people you fire to feel? Happy about it? Glad? Thanking you profusely? Just because you don’t have a high opinion of them as workers doesn’t mean they’re not human. Being fired hurts. It causes people pain. People tend to resent having pain inflicted on them, even if the person doing it feels justified in doing so, and is justified in doing so. It’s not like you’re a doctor – the result of your operation may make their lives better, but it probably won’t.
