4 ms·

I don't understand some of the comments here, maybe someone can explain. Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is there a right to stay emplo

I don't understand some of the comments here, maybe someone can explain. Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is there a right to stay employed? As far as I am aware working for a company is not a life-long situation. And further - why don't we invert it and praise these companies for supplying thousands of six figure jobs for years. Surely being employed for several years is better than never being hired at all?

malteof 4y ago
They need to explain themselves to shareholders (why did they hire so many people in the first place, expensive) and employees (so that people want to keep working there also in the future).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
helmholtz 4y ago
> Is there a right to stay employed? People have spouses, kids, mortgages. They relocate for work. They pour a lot of their time, energy & emotion into it. It causes people strokes, and hairloss. People bring the stress of their work home, and marriages suffer for it. Your comment is rather glib. Praise these companies? No thanks.
gls2ro 4y ago
(I am not talking here about Google but more like general) A company (especially a big one) needs to have an excuse to let people go. The argument here is two-fold: 1. There is a power imbalance between a company and an employee. Just as a short example: letting go of 1 employee usually means nothing for the company life, but for the employee is biggest/impactful event happening that month or maybe that half of the year. Thus we usually balance this with laws (in some countries/states) and, of course, with public expectations. 2. Companies are asking for your whole professional time, and they usually want exclusivity You can see this usually written in contracts like "you dedicate all your work time", "you cannot work for other companies", "you dedicate all your business time" ... Thus when a company is asking this from you then they need to offer something in exchange. And this exchange is they need an excuse to let you go. --- (again I don't speak here about Google as I never worked there so I don't know what they offer and what they ask for)
progbits 4y ago
> Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is there a right to stay employed Not in late-stage capitalism, but elsewhere yes. For example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Redundancies_Directive_1998 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Redundancies_Dire...
belugacat 4y ago
In some cultures the prevalent view is that employees should be grateful to their employer for providing them with a job and a paycheck, and that the needs of the business comes first and therefore the business should be free to layoff employees when it deems it necessary. In other cultures, the view is more that the business benefits from various social contracts (governments providing various structures & regulations so that businesses can flourish, the cost of healthcare/education that leads to a productive workforce being taken on in part or whole by the state, etc), that the employer/employee relationship is fundamentally asymmetrical, and therefore that an employer has a social responsibility to provide stability and not do reckless things like hire 20k people to layoff 10k the following year. US work culture, and tech particularly, lean more towards the first side of the spectrum in my experience, but that doesn’t mean everyone is aligned with it or that it is the One Truth.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- netheril96 4y ago
  I don't think that the US has the culture that employees should be grateful to their employer for providing them with a job and a paycheck. The idea of at will employment comes from the ideology of freedom rather than who owes who.
  - lscdlscd 4y ago
    At will employment always always benefits the employers more than employees. Your job is tied to your health insurance as well. So there is a much much bigger incentive for an employee to stay at a company than for a company to keep an employee.
paganel 4y ago
> Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is there a right to stay employed? When you work for a small to medium company yeah, I expect something like responsibility and a little more than "just contractual obligations" (from both sides, both the employer and the employee). But it when it comes to behemoths like Alphabet things change completely, it's all about the money and the contract.
lmm 4y ago
> Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is there a right to stay employed? Generally in developed countries, yes.
- kkoncevicius 4y ago
  Oh, this is new to me. Which developed countries have the right to stay employed?
  - mmmmmbop 4y ago
    Germany, for example.
    - kkoncevicius 4y ago
      So it seems in Germany you can only fire employees if you are undergoing a downsizing or internal restructuring. I wonder if this Google layoff would apply. If they closing off whole teams this could potentially count as "restructuring".
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
Draiken 4y ago
Comments like these tell me how ingrained capitalism is on people's minds now. We seem to forget that without the people that make up the company, it simply does not exist. Companies are imaginary entities chasing profits for its owners. There's nothing sacred about it and they shouldn't EVER be more important than people. I don't understand how we can lose sight of that.
- kkoncevicius 4y ago
  > Companies are imaginary entities chasing profits for its owners. There's nothing sacred about it and they shouldn't EVER be more important than people. A company of 50,000 operating at a loss will eventually fire 50,000 people. If it can turn things around by firing 10,000 - why not? Further, in a company there might be temporary teams that implement a project and then are laid off. Surely it's better to have these positions than to not hire any people at all. Even further, life is not static and things change. Not adapting to changes eventually would lead to stagnant and disfunctional situations, where a product would be made more expensive for everyone, just so a some company has the capital to continue hiring 10,000 or so people who are not longer doing any work. But, perhaps more importantly, those 10,000 people are stuck in meaningless positions doing empty "work" for the sake of numbers on some accounting sheet. And even further futher, if these no longer useful jobs are in manufacturing then continuing them would mean wasting natural resources and polluting the environment.
  - netheril96 4y ago
    > A company of 50,000 operating at a loss will eventually fire 50,000 people. If it can turn things around by firing 10,000 - why not? This argument, true or false, is not applicable in this situation, as Google is still enjoying high profits.
  - Draiken 4y ago
    The only reason we find ourselves in this place is because of this hyper-growth mentality that is unsustainable by definition. As someone else pointed out, this specific point is moot in this case. They are just looking for even more profits. It's not even close to a "struggling company". But regardless, if this was a case for a struggling company, this is short-sighted in the sense that it assumes that we have to live in a world bound by the current rules. Of course under these conditions companies will always choose to fire people and keep making profits to its owners. But let's not pretend this would be an effort to help these 50k people in the first place. This is to keep the owner(s) profitable.
electriclove 4y ago
I agree with this. There is an economic cycle and this always happens.

malteof 4y ago

They need to explain themselves to shareholders (why did they hire so many people in the first place, expensive) and employees (so that people want to keep working there also in the future).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

helmholtz 4y ago

> Is there a right to stay employed? People have spouses, kids, mortgages. They relocate for work. They pour a lot of their time, energy & emotion into it. It causes people strokes, and hairloss. People bring the stress of their work home, and marriages suffer for it. Your comment is rather glib. Praise these companies? No thanks.

gls2ro 4y ago

(I am not talking here about Google but more like general) A company (especially a big one) needs to have an excuse to let people go. The argument here is two-fold: 1. There is a power imbalance between a company and an employee. Just as a short example: letting go of 1 employee usually means nothing for the company life, but for the employee is biggest/impactful event happening that month or maybe that half of the year. Thus we usually balance this with laws (in some countries/states) and, of course, with public expectations. 2. Companies are asking for your whole professional time, and they usually want exclusivity You can see this usually written in contracts like "you dedicate all your work time", "you cannot work for other companies", "you dedicate all your business time" ... Thus when a company is asking this from you then they need to offer something in exchange. And this exchange is they need an excuse to let you go. --- (again I don't speak here about Google as I never worked there so I don't know what they offer and what they ask for)

progbits 4y ago

> Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is there a right to stay employed Not in late-stage capitalism, but elsewhere yes. For example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Redundancies_Directive_1998 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Redundancies_Dire...

belugacat 4y ago

In some cultures the prevalent view is that employees should be grateful to their employer for providing them with a job and a paycheck, and that the needs of the business comes first and therefore the business should be free to layoff employees when it deems it necessary. In other cultures, the view is more that the business benefits from various social contracts (governments providing various structures & regulations so that businesses can flourish, the cost of healthcare/education that leads to a productive workforce being taken on in part or whole by the state, etc), that the employer/employee relationship is fundamentally asymmetrical, and therefore that an employer has a social responsibility to provide stability and not do reckless things like hire 20k people to layoff 10k the following year. US work culture, and tech particularly, lean more towards the first side of the spectrum in my experience, but that doesn’t mean everyone is aligned with it or that it is the One Truth.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
netheril96 4y ago
I don't think that the US has the culture that employees should be grateful to their employer for providing them with a job and a paycheck. The idea of at will employment comes from the ideology of freedom rather than who owes who.
- lscdlscd 4y ago
  At will employment always always benefits the employers more than employees. Your job is tied to your health insurance as well. So there is a much much bigger incentive for an employee to stay at a company than for a company to keep an employee.

paganel 4y ago

> Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is there a right to stay employed? When you work for a small to medium company yeah, I expect something like responsibility and a little more than "just contractual obligations" (from both sides, both the employer and the employee). But it when it comes to behemoths like Alphabet things change completely, it's all about the money and the contract.

lmm 4y ago

> Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is there a right to stay employed? Generally in developed countries, yes.

kkoncevicius 4y ago
Oh, this is new to me. Which developed countries have the right to stay employed?
- mmmmmbop 4y ago
  Germany, for example.
  - kkoncevicius 4y ago
    So it seems in Germany you can only fire employees if you are undergoing a downsizing or internal restructuring. I wonder if this Google layoff would apply. If they closing off whole teams this could potentially count as "restructuring".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

Draiken 4y ago

Comments like these tell me how ingrained capitalism is on people's minds now. We seem to forget that without the people that make up the company, it simply does not exist. Companies are imaginary entities chasing profits for its owners. There's nothing sacred about it and they shouldn't EVER be more important than people. I don't understand how we can lose sight of that.

kkoncevicius 4y ago
> Companies are imaginary entities chasing profits for its owners. There's nothing sacred about it and they shouldn't EVER be more important than people. A company of 50,000 operating at a loss will eventually fire 50,000 people. If it can turn things around by firing 10,000 - why not? Further, in a company there might be temporary teams that implement a project and then are laid off. Surely it's better to have these positions than to not hire any people at all. Even further, life is not static and things change. Not adapting to changes eventually would lead to stagnant and disfunctional situations, where a product would be made more expensive for everyone, just so a some company has the capital to continue hiring 10,000 or so people who are not longer doing any work. But, perhaps more importantly, those 10,000 people are stuck in meaningless positions doing empty "work" for the sake of numbers on some accounting sheet. And even further futher, if these no longer useful jobs are in manufacturing then continuing them would mean wasting natural resources and polluting the environment.
- netheril96 4y ago
  > A company of 50,000 operating at a loss will eventually fire 50,000 people. If it can turn things around by firing 10,000 - why not? This argument, true or false, is not applicable in this situation, as Google is still enjoying high profits.
- Draiken 4y ago
  The only reason we find ourselves in this place is because of this hyper-growth mentality that is unsustainable by definition. As someone else pointed out, this specific point is moot in this case. They are just looking for even more profits. It's not even close to a "struggling company". But regardless, if this was a case for a struggling company, this is short-sighted in the sense that it assumes that we have to live in a world bound by the current rules. Of course under these conditions companies will always choose to fire people and keep making profits to its owners. But let's not pretend this would be an effort to help these 50k people in the first place. This is to keep the owner(s) profitable.

electriclove 4y ago

I agree with this. There is an economic cycle and this always happens.