4 ms·

Do you have any information about the company's position and needs? About what options they have? About the ranges of outcomes of the various options? About the

Do you have any information about the company's position and needs? About what options they have? About the ranges of outcomes of the various options? About the decision making process and politics that lead to this option? Otherwise, it's just a very speculative assumption, repeated by many, that firing people must be good. Management must be acting in the company's best interests - they couldn't be biased or selfish or just making a mistake - and employees are generally a burden and a commodity. I'd like to repost something maceo posted last year, that I saved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9502757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9502757 Human labor is not a commodity. This was the common sense amongst all working people for most of the 20th century. Samuel Gompers, maybe the most conservative labor leader of his time, said "You cannot weigh the human soul on the same scales as piece of pork." And working people, along with the management class for the most part, understood this to be an undeniable truth. In fact, this piece of common sense was enshrined into US law with the Clayton Act of 1914, which stated "The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce." But in the last 20 years, as capital has gained the firm upper hand, the common sense understanding has shifted towards the idea that labor is in fact a commodity. The ideas behind the so-called "on-demand workforce" further solidify the notion that labor is a commodity. After all, you can order an uber ride just as easily as you can order vitamins online. It's so pervasive that even I, someone born into a union family and a firm believer in the idea of worker solidarity, have to force myself to believe that labor is not a commodity. Why? The business class treated labor as expendable in 1915, just as they do in 2015. Why did working people understand this truth in 1915 but not today? I don't know. I read a recently released sociology book earlier this year (going crazy looking for the title/author, can't find it), that posits millennials are far more likely than any recent generation to blame themselves for the problems they face. It's part of the reason that the self-help industry is bigger business than it's ever been. It's not always your fault. Our modern economy is built on rotten ideas like labor = commodity. If we want to do something about inequality, it's time that we subject fundamentally unjust ideas like these to a serious critique.

toyg 11y ago
> Why did working people understand this truth in 1915 but not today? My cynical view (as another 'born into a union family' etc etc) is that, back then, enraged human souls could take out their anger on the material interests and personal safety of capital owners. A factory would burn, stock would get ruined, people would get physically threatened. That empowered workers and did a lot in making owners understand that humans are not tools that you can just put down when not needed. Nowadays what you gonna do, burn a few laptops? Smash a few desks? Big deal. The owner or CEO responsible for directives is probably in another continent, essential business interests are in datacentres across the world. Unless you are an uber-skilled security professional, you simply have no significant recourse. You could lynch the redundancy managers sent to deal with you (as they are starting to do in France), but the owners will just hire a few more. What this means is that, behind all our philosophy about Sharing Economies, Clouds and so on, the new model of work is really the Mechanical Turk: machine-mediated work distribution across an atomized workforce. Until we stop loving the machine, we will not stop this trend. This is generationally very hard, because we have grown with these machines and we've seen them shape our world and our professions - how can we not like them? There is still so much to do, so many opportunities... We are going through an industrial revolution the likes of which had not been seen since the early 1800s, and we know those were not easy years for the common folk. It will take a few more generations to stabilize and get to grip with new social realities; it will take people who were born after machines stopped being novel, people who can consciously refuse and refute the model pushed upon them by networks, computers and centralized capital. It will probably not be millennials, but maybe their kids will be desperate enough to start considering real changes.
- Flenser 11y ago
  I've seen executive disconnect work the other way too. I'm currently sitting in an empty room because the rest of my team resigned in the last 5 months thanks to a short-sighted executive directive.
Animats 11y ago
I've made similar comments. That statement is in the International Labour Organization's founding documents, and it almost made it into the UN Charter. The US forced it into Germany's postwar law. Here's a summary of worker's rights in Germany.[1] [1] https://www.wilmerhale.com/pages/publicationsandNewsDetail.aspx?NewsPubId=90463 https://www.wilmerhale.com/pages/publicationsandNewsDetail.a...

toyg 11y ago

> Why did working people understand this truth in 1915 but not today? My cynical view (as another 'born into a union family' etc etc) is that, back then, enraged human souls could take out their anger on the material interests and personal safety of capital owners. A factory would burn, stock would get ruined, people would get physically threatened. That empowered workers and did a lot in making owners understand that humans are not tools that you can just put down when not needed. Nowadays what you gonna do, burn a few laptops? Smash a few desks? Big deal. The owner or CEO responsible for directives is probably in another continent, essential business interests are in datacentres across the world. Unless you are an uber-skilled security professional, you simply have no significant recourse. You could lynch the redundancy managers sent to deal with you (as they are starting to do in France), but the owners will just hire a few more. What this means is that, behind all our philosophy about Sharing Economies, Clouds and so on, the new model of work is really the Mechanical Turk: machine-mediated work distribution across an atomized workforce. Until we stop loving the machine, we will not stop this trend. This is generationally very hard, because we have grown with these machines and we've seen them shape our world and our professions - how can we not like them? There is still so much to do, so many opportunities... We are going through an industrial revolution the likes of which had not been seen since the early 1800s, and we know those were not easy years for the common folk. It will take a few more generations to stabilize and get to grip with new social realities; it will take people who were born after machines stopped being novel, people who can consciously refuse and refute the model pushed upon them by networks, computers and centralized capital. It will probably not be millennials, but maybe their kids will be desperate enough to start considering real changes.

Flenser 11y ago
I've seen executive disconnect work the other way too. I'm currently sitting in an empty room because the rest of my team resigned in the last 5 months thanks to a short-sighted executive directive.

Animats 11y ago

I've made similar comments. That statement is in the International Labour Organization's founding documents, and it almost made it into the UN Charter. The US forced it into Germany's postwar law. Here's a summary of worker's rights in Germany.[1] [1] https://www.wilmerhale.com/pages/publicationsandNewsDetail.aspx?NewsPubId=90463 https://www.wilmerhale.com/pages/publicationsandNewsDetail.a...