Do you consider a contractor at the end of a contract fired? How about a freelancer who finishes a project? The benefit of such a system is that an employee who feels his contract is not going to be renewed (and I assume there is warning) or doesn’t want it to be renewed has plenty of time to find other work, since the end date is known far in advance.
I’m not advocating this, since I agree with you on the lack of flexibility.
A lot of the issues you are concerned with would vanish if we had a full employment economy. It doesn’t solve everything - my daughter’s boyfriend’s father couldn’t find work in Silicon Valley during the bubble, which took some doing.
Actually, I thought some interesting viewpoints have come out of this thread: I had no idea so many people would come out in favor of firing. I was also interested to learn how many putatively conservative pro-business types are for expanding the social safety net. I doubt if they’d favor expanding it as much as I would, but then, I doubt if I’d favor expanding it as much as they think I would. I think.
Anyway, if a Mod wants to close this as a non-debate, I’m cool with it.
I’m kind of curious about where you get “license to treat people like crap” from “work should be a mutually beneficial relationship.” There are very, very few professions in which being treated like crap would be considered part of a mutual benefit.
To answer your OP more straightforwardly: In my opinion, firing people, like divorce and abortion, while not generally a pleasant human behavior, is a necessary option. Does that make it good? From my perspective, by definition, yes – if it’s necessary and it exists, it’s good. It’s not nice, it’s not pleasant, but it’s good.
Of course, if nice and pleasant are part of what you mean by good, then it’s not good.
I’m a supervisor. While I haven’t actually the authority to fire someone, I do have the authority to do the paperwork for firing somebody. Then, as long as my supervisor and HR agree, the person is terminated.
I don’t go through all that trouble just because I get a kick from firing someone, I go through the trouble because someone is causing me trouble… either by not doing their job, breaking company policy, or violating the law. By firing someone, I go through a month of pain in the ass forms and meetings with my supervisor, HR, and sometimes legal, just to make my life easier by having my team able to do its job without someone holding it back.
Is that bad for the fired person? I really don’t care because by the time I’m fed up enough to do the paperwork for terminating them, I’ve talked to them, written up disciplinary actions, warned them, and told them exactly what they needed to do to keep their jobs. If they wanted to keep their job, I feel at some point they would have changed their work habits to something that would benefit the company.
The anarchist rants and raves. Frankly, I’ve heard better (and quite frankly, more informed) from several subway philosophers.
If you don’t want to be a part of a “company”, then be an entrepeneur. Michael Dell didn’t want to be part of a company. Gates, Bezos, Jobs…the list goes on and on. Want just a subsistence farm, relying on your own two hands and the fertile earth? No one is stopping you. Might I suggest, however, before you embark upon that course, that you hock your PC and turn off your cable and phone connections. You’re going to need the money, because as long as you are protected by policemen and firemen, there are going to be taxes.
I consider firing a person to be treating them like crap. I know that in some cases they have royally earned it, in others it’s a painful necessity, but that doesn’t change the basic nature of the experience. Just because you’ve hired someone, it doesn’t really balance the firing. We need to figure out a way to do things better. Like at MIT, when the bright grad students there stop producing, the director there would orchestrate job offers for them. Of course, that was pretty easy with a population of MIT information science grads … but as has been pointed out, in a full-employment society, the penalties for being fired might not be so harsh.
Ah. The crux of our disagreement, then, is that I consider firing a person in some circumstances be treating them like crap, and in other circumstances to be a proper response to being treated like crap. (These are not the only two options, but they’ll work for now.)
Fair enough: some people’s behavior in the workplace could be described like that – certainly, it is a poor return for someone paying them money and trusting them to work. But as inconvenient and troublesome as such people are, it’s nothing compared to the problems of being unemployed. Yeah, the crap-treating goes both ways at times, but you have the equivalent of a 50 caliber machine gun and they have the equivalent of a BB gun (in most employment situations) so don’t pretend there’s an equivalence there. There’s not.
Well, and again we disagree - it IS something compared to the problems of being unemployed. A employee who is not adding value is taking my (imagined - I’m a corporate cog) company down with them. Once again, I’d rather see one person unemployed by their own actions than need to lay off 50 because my revenue cannot support the payroll expense.
I don’t worry too much about converting the folks I disagree with to my POV. You have to remember, there are a lot of lurkers on the board who seldom if ever post. It’s unlikely that one will convert someone who has already publicly staked out a position to your point of view. I just figure that, given the way the conservatives dominate the media, it’s good that lurkers are exposed to alternative viewpoints, whether they buy into them or not. Not having publicly staked out a position on an issue, they are freer to be persuaded by either side.
Why thank you for analysis of my posts, Curious Joe (a misnomer if ever there was one). Perhaps if you dug deeper, you’d see that when I do get involved in GD threads, it tends to be in financial/economic debates, where I have much experience (and can back up the experience with cites, when necessary). The endless religious and political debates that constantly litter the front page are not of interest. This is a workplace debate, where I’ve been in both the position of a firee, a person who had to counsel non-performing employees ‘out-the-door’ (in other words, they quit before being fired) and a person who had to recommend firings (which my firms HR departments carried out, by firm policy).
You bring up the European model. As someone who would like more time-off, I see some benefits to the European model (leaving aside which ‘European’ model you mean - the French?, the English? the Irish? I know my Irish and English counterparts do not work a 35 hour and consider a 45 hour week a luxury. They also tend to make less in base pay and get smaller bonuses, and pay more in taxes, but they do have more time off). I also see issues that I don’t pretend to have the answer to - mainly, how do you fund it, and would such a system work across a nation much more diverse than any single European nation.
Then you rant about ‘companies’ and ‘corporations’ and how you can’t homestead due to the eveeeeeel conglomerates. This segues into how you are angry at the world and wish you were never born into such a corrupt and eveeeeeel system. You finish with a threat at the ‘stick it to The Man’ should ‘they’ leave you with no way to make a living (because, I assume, it’s their duty to provide you with a living, not your duty to provide yourself with a way to ensure you have a living). Yet you call me on a lack of cites and inability to properly post in GD? You act like over the past 4-5 years (longer if you include lurking time), I haven’t figured out how GD works, whilst you’ve mastered it in 14 short posts?
I’ll tell you what. Continue to litter GD with crap like post no. 127. I’m sure there will be a Pit thread for you in the near future, and I’ll happily participate there. And if you honestly and intellectually wish to debate the benefits and downsides of the financial topics, I’ll be here. And when there’s no posts on the topic, I’ll return to discussing 24 in CS, sports in IMHO and MPSIMS and to flinging poo in the Pit. I look forward to seeing you there.
In order to fully address the question of societal harm resulting from firing people, I believe that it is imperative to compare it to situations where firing people is not a readily accomplished option and determine which scenario is truly more harmful. I wish to elaborate on this theme at length, but it will have to wait until I return from renewing my license at the DMV…that shouldn’t take more than 6 or 7 hours.
If an employee was given clear-cut goals and a reasonable timetable for reaching them, yet failed. Then fire them.
My own experience has been that the only 2 jobs I’ve been fired from were the lowest-paid I ever held. These jobs had little or nothing in the way of training goals; everyone was led to believe that they wouldn’t fire you if you showed up every day and did at least what you were told. Upon firing, the firees were always told that they weren’t “making sufficient progress”. How can one judge progress when the goals were never defined in the first place?
Actually, both firings came just short of a promised “longevity raise”. Other firees from those 2 jobs had similar experiences to mine. Apparently “insufficient progress” meant, “You took our bullshit longer than most and now you’re about to cost us another 50 cents/hour.”
That thread is just further evidence of my weariness with all these saintly manager and employers who worry so about their employees’ futures who are implied or directly referenced in this thread. I am willing to give managers and employers who participate in this thread the benefit of the doubt, but it’s very obvious from the thread you cite and many others that there are a lot of managers and employers who are just plain assholes, who take every possible advantage of their employees and dump them like yesterday’s garbage without regard to their efforts if it seems convenient or money-saving. Those who post her try to put as nice a face on firing as they can, but as long as there are so many absolute assholes in positions of authority in the workplace, firing will remain a very ugly, very bad thing indeed.