Work - That "Sense of Inhumanity" and Unlike When I Got the Ax, Employees Can Do Something about That

 Business is business. But the fact that it is business in a highly capitalistic culture doesn't give those we used to call “the captains of industry” permission to be value-free of social mores. After all, business is a human institution. Yahoo Finance reports, the recent layoffs in tech have been described as having a "sense of inhumanity."

For instance one former Google employee found out about getting the ax via a media report in The New York Times and being locked out of corporate email. 

There are myriad versions of that brutality. Actually, they are nothing new. Forever it seems that for decades in the American way of capitalism employers have been getting away with cold indifference to what taking away someone's job entails.

In 1982, the director of a manufacturing corporation called me into his office at 4:45 PM on a Monday. He delivered the bad news. I cried. He looked at his watch.

There was nothing I felt I could do. It was pre-social media and professional anonymous networks such as Blind, Fishbowl, and Reddit. There are also now the videos on TikTok. Even though LinkedIn has an ethos of positivity former employees are telling their stories of shock and disappointment at how they were treated.

You don't have to be a Human Resources expert or a McKinsey consultant to forecast that more layoffs - lots more - could be coming. Before they do those who do have jobs should play with scenarios how they will respond in public to how the process goes if they are terminated. With the shifting ethos the about management/worker contract they probably have nothing to lose by pushing back on how it all went down. It will not be atypical.

It's quaint to recall that what made big news in 2008 was that when fired Paul Hastings associate Shinyung Oh did something before leaving. That was transmitting a firm-wide email describing how she perceived that situation. (Currently, of course, "they" would have shut down her email.) 

Now sharing the details of being separated from how you make your living is standard. Actually that has extended to describing why we voluntarily chose to leave a job or a contract assignment. 

Ethically, it seems the responsibility of those who need to earn a living to not allow the signers of the paychecks to get off the hook for increasing the inherent inhumanity in capitalism. 

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