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Morals and Layoffs
Radical changes in modern institutional structure have ushered in an era of short-term, contract, or episodic labor, writes economist Richard Sennett in his book The Corrosion of Character. Corporations have sought to remove layers of bureaucracy, to become "flatter and more flexible" organizations. In place of pyramid-style organizations, management wants now to think of organizations as networks. This means many more layoffs, writes Sennett, and also that promotions and dismissals tend not to be based any longer on fixed rules, since tasks are fluid, and the network is constantly redefining its structure.
Executives are paid more and more to re-shape companies, and work becomes less stable in direct proportion. Workers have never been more powerless, their tenure more fragile. Tech workers, many of whom came of age in an era of growth and full employment, are learning the lessons of the real world quickly. Tasks and missions are temporal, the people employed to execute them highly disposable. Work and workers are both flexible and expendable.
One of the most shocking and widely accepted tenets of the new techno-workplace is that the well-run company, the one that wants to compete in the global economy, has to be so fluid, evolving and responsive to change that thousands of employees can get dumped at one whack and it's not even controversial. That's a pretty long trek from the capitalist ethic that only a few years ago valued corporate loyalty as much as profits, and touted the company-employee bond.
And it raises all sorts of new questions -- especially for a generation of tech workers experiencing layoffs for the first time.
In the Corporate Republic, where corporations fund the political system, control most mass media, write legislation, and now dominate entertainment and culture (and soon, much of technology, from bio-tech to Net access), there are few agreed-upon rules about layoffs. Hardly any would get far in Washington, the world headquarters of corporate lobbying. (Congress, allegedly the public's lobbyists, are scrambling to get campaign funds from corporate donors.)
Unions, already on the wane, have never gained much hold in the Tech Nation, populated by educated, mobile, skilled and independent-minded workers. Some tech companies are comparatively generous -- extending health plans beyond the federal requirements with some benefits extending past a layoff date.
Cisco has offered to pay its laid-off workers for an additional year if they work for charities the company supports. It's nice, but it isn't the same as job security. And even that kind of moral responsibility is rare.
Under COBRA (The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) passed by Congress in l985, some laid-off or terminated workers (those fired for reasons other than gross misconduct) are entitled to continuation of health benefits for extended periods of time. COBRA doesn't cover companies with fewer than 20 employees, and it doesn't cover all workers terminated under all circumstances. If the company goes bankrupt, for example, COBRA doesn't apply at all. You have to check and see if you're eligible.)
Corporations have no particular incentive to be generous, or even ethical, to terminated employees. Most answer to boards of directors and demanding shareholders expecting maximum profits. Generosity towards workers doesn't serve the bottom line, even when it might serve the company's long-term interests. One of the reasons Cisco treats laid-off workers well, company officials have conceded, is to keep morale high among remaining employees, who feel better about the company and the work they do for it.
All sorts of class issues are roiling the new, techno-driven workforce, amid the thousands of layoffs being announced weekly.
The layoff was once the more or less exclusive province of the working class. but in recent years -- and especially recent months -- it has become a fixture of the white-collar and managerial universe, and of skilled, educated, tech workers. U.S. employment figures show the number of workers on nonfarm payrolls plummeting.
Now lawyers and journalists are getting laid off as well as tech workers, and when reporters started hitting the sidewalk, layoffs became a big story in a hurry.
Yahoo, Dell, AOL Time-Warner and scores of other companies have collectively let go of hundreds of thousands of employees (soon, probably to be followed by layoffs at the new company formed by Hewlitt-Packard's acquisition of Compaq). A generation of tech workers, for the first time, is feeling the impact of a workplace in which corporations seem to feel virtually no moral obligation to the employees they let go.
So just what moral obligation does a company have to laid-off workers?
Some possibilities:
- Maximum warning. Employees ought to have between three and six months' notice before they're laid off, time enough to look for other work in a sane, secure way.
- Continued health benefits. Employment used to be a contract: you worked hard for the company, the company took reasonable care of you. Employees who have been with a corporation any length of time at all -- I'd say six months -- ought to keep their health benefits until they find new work, a guarantee not even COBRA provides.
- Innovative responses. The layoff has become almost a corporate reflex, a statement to analysts, boards of directors and stockholders that management is lean and mean. When the market drops, capital gets squeezed,or takeovers occur, employment gets slashed. This often seems short-sighted. Tech workers are skilled and valuable. It's difficult to predict the nature of technology, and of consumer attitudes towards technological products and innovation. People laid off today might be urgently needed in six months. Shouldn't they at least have a chance to come up with other tasks, products, functions or ideas before they're booted out?
For that matter, tech workers could seek out companies with humane policies towards their workforce, making the companies more valuable and competitive. They could also begin demanding contracts and codified job security when the seek and accept positions -- especially when the economy is in their favor.
Regulatory agencies consider the impact of corporate decision-making on the environment, the consumer, and on anti-trust issues. Why aren't consideration of layoffs and job losses a factor in mergers like that between AOL and Time-Warner, or Hewlitt-Packard and Compaq? Maybe the loss of thousands of jobs isn't worth the short-term savings of some mergers.
Let's not kid ourselves. In the Corporate Republic, we can't expect companies, governments, unions or regulatory agencies to strengthen a sense of corporate morality or humanity. Corporations are more powerful than any of these entities, as tech workers are discovering by the thousands. Workers are on their own. Companies will demonstrate loyalty when they re-gain a sense that it's more efficient, ultimately more profitable, to keep experienced loyal workers than to employ insecure short-term ones. That's possible. But it isn't likely.
Security of the individual seems to be taking a very solid backseat to the security of the institutions that are supposed to be providing security for the individual.
Every institution seems to eventually forget that their strength comes from the people underneath, be it a company or a government.
Laws should spring forth from society and not be sent down from above. As well as a company's employees should work to better a company rather than having a company as a shelter from poverty.
We have forgotten that the relationship of larger institutions and the individual is a symbiotic one.
After allowing employees to take a voluntary pay cut to save their company and thereby their jobs, Hewlett Packard has found the $130 million in savings was not enough to make investors happy. So, some of the very same employees who gave up salary "for the benefit of the company" are seeing their loyalty paid off in pink slips.
But wait. In what they are heralding as "the next era in employee outplacement," HP is giving it employees a choice of how exactly they will be shitcanned. Apparently, the recent repositioning campaign about sending HP back to the garage where its founder, well, founded the company was no metaphor. By the time the company is done trimming, the remaining staff will be able to comfortably fit in an average two car garage.
Industry analysts say that if HP keeps firing people at this rate, they should be in the black by year's end, even if they sell nothing at all.
More than 6,000 HP Employees found this check-a-box note in their mail trays on Thursday morning.
[Note: "Have my manager fired or laid-off instead of me" was not part of the option menu. Neither was "Screw the investors, we're not in the f***ing commodity business."]
HP CEO Carly Fiorina says that she is excited about the company's brave new direction in outplacement.
"At HP, we've always been innovators in terms of employee benefits and employee options," said Fiorina. "We think other companies in our peer group will be following our lead."
Chief among the innovations in the program is the new "volunteer status" which allows employees to continue working for HP and serving HP customers without actually getting paid. While the money they would have made is not tax deductible, they are, as Fiorina put it, perfectly free to brag about it as they would for any volunteer work. The company has outlined preliminary plans for Habitat-For-Humanity-style t-shirts for the new volunteers.
"You would be shocked to learn what people will do for a t-shirt," said Fiorina.
C'mon, Jon, i've come to expect a certain "knee-jerk" response from you on these posts, and frankly I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't see it here. Actually, I'd like to see some answers. After the events of the past two weeks, I think that all of us are rethinking our job stability.
John
Boy, jus tlike Katz to pick up a 30 year old trend and call it new.
Of course, in the '70;s it was blue collar workers like steel and auto workers.
In the early 90's it was mid level managers.
Now it's affecting geeks who's geekiness is being able to start Front Page and write wysiwig web pages.
As someone who worked through the 90-91 recession, this is nothing new, keep your skills up to date and keep rolling with the punches.
Many times "company loyalty" only goes one way with the employee giving it and the company giving the employee "the shaft." I have been there. However, I find it silly to expect that I can walk away from my job anytime, leaving my employer with ruined plans and wasted money but they must give me advanced notice before letting me go.
Don't get me wrong, an employer treating me right before letting me loose would be great! As an employee I should be willing to do the same for my employer should I start pursuing a career path away from them.
That sounds good, but you will not get much work out of people that know their job is gone in six months -- especially while they are looking for other work. You then end up fighting the urge to just fire the employee.
Click here or here.
I've been made redundant twice this year.
After working for Grey Interactive UK for 18 months the tech slowdown eventually forced them to loose staff. throughout this process we were consulted and kept up to date with goings on, and when it came to the inevitable announcement I was one of approx 30% of the company. I was told that GIUK would try to place me with another Grey company, and if unsuccessful, within a month I would be made redundant. I was free to use the facilities to print CVs, browse the net, and generally look for work. I chose not to pursue a relocation to another Grey office, and spent most of the time out of the office, however, it was good to know there was some support there.
I found work with a company called Zinc a few weeks later and things were looking up, however after five weeks (yes weeks) I was called up, out of the blue with no forewarning. I was told their parent company was asking then to make redundancies (much like grey), and as it was a Last in First Out basis, I was to go.. I was escorted out the building and given a weeks notice pay.
in retrospect I feel I was treated fairly by Grey and discovered that small things can make such a huge difference in how you perceive you are being treated.
I think the most important thing is to keep your employees informed. It was such an amazing shock to me and I still feel rather bitter about it (while having fonder memories of my time at Grey (of course I was pretty pissed off about it at the time))
I have since found a new job... far from ideal, however beggars can't be choosers in the current tech climate
EMACS?! VI?! I target the individual bits on my HDD by diverting the path of cosmic rays through sheer willpower alone!
I've been in this business for almost as long as the majority of users here have been alive. I've seen sweeping changes over the years as to how a company treats their tech workers.
When I started up true techs where few and far between in my geographical area. Most of the guys I knew who got into this business where starting a second career, thus older than the lot we have today, and had varying backgrounds like electronics wizards, telecom guys from the military, etc. We where treated with a lot more respect because the companies we worked for knew that they would have problems if we ever left.
The networks we put together weren't just made up of commodity hardware you can buy at the local CompUSA. Most networks where a reflection of the team that designed them. Little inconsistancies and tricks that only they knew about. If the sysop where to be let go, they'd be in for trouble.
Today we have millions of qualified(?) cookie cutter tech guys (and gals) out in the workforce. They've all pretty much had the same exposure to technology as they grew up and went to school. Basically, they're interchangable. I know this is a generalization, but it holds true for 99%.
It's very hard these days to distinguish yourself as a vital part of the corporate machine. Techs can be let go at anytime with the understanding that it will be easy to replace them with someone of equal ability and the skills required to manage an existing system.
load "linux",8,1
No, the employers caused this when they did the mass layoffs for "downsizing" in the early nineties. Anyone who even watched that from afar should have learned that loyalty ain't worth shit, and you should always (a) keep your skills up; and (b) keep your eyes open for better opportunities. Since job-hopping is more accepted in the tech business, this naturally led to people switching more oten during the boom. Now that we're almost certainly in a recession, it's more difficult - but that doesn't mean that we should all turn into starched-collared Organization Men again.
sulli
RTFJ.
I work in the Silicon Valley. A number of companies here find it hard to get workers because they treated layoffs wrong. Loyalty is a two-way transaction. For example, the armed services are learning this, because there appears to be a crisis of downward loyalty (this has been written about pretty extensively). Basically top brass sacrifice their subordinates, and it's quit working. Captain-level attrition was never higher.
It's the same in industry. Some companies -always- have waiting lists. Some companies play hell getting people to come on board. There's a reason for that. Corporate, like individual, reputation has a lot to do with how willing people are to work there. And reputation, both good and bad, is pretty often earned.
If you are looking for work in the private sector (corporations) a Ph.D. is a complete waste. Salary studies consistently show that people in tech jobs with a tech bachelor's and an MBA earn roughly twice as much as PhD's. People with Tech Masters come in a close second.
People with PhDs in Tech jobs average somewhere between high school graduates and college dropouts in salary. Yes there are excpetions, but as a rule a Masters degree is the top of the line.
Remeber the old sayings about PhD? Piled Higher and Deeper; and Someone who knows more and more about less and less.
Chris
-- I need more coffee. It's Monday. There is no such thing as enough coffee on a Monday.
This thinking came because of the reverse...
Most companies haven't been thinking in terms of engendering employee loyalty for well over a decade now. I know, I've been in two of the downturns in the economy now- they (corporations) tend only to think of that bottom line. And worse, they think of it in only short-term thoughts. All this bloodletting they're doing to their staff makes them look good on paper, but they just got rid of at least part of the people that were needed to make their projects they have in progress go- they're butchering their medium-term and possibly their long-term profitability to look good in the here and now.
This all came about from the last downturn in the economy some ten years ago when there were...wait for it...mass layoffs not unlike now, etc. The companies showed absolutely no loyalty then- why should the employees show them any loyalty when they're going to keep doing it over and over and over...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I believe that this is just one aspect of a very frightening shift of accountability and responsibility in the United States that has occured over the past 120 years. Abraham Lincoln once said that this "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth." Well, we've proven him wrong. The US is a government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation.
Look, for example, at the Anti-Terrorism Act that would make hacking a terrorist act, punishable by life in prison and subject to RICO statutes. I'm not going to claim any support for hacking, but there is something fundamentally wrong with a nation where financial crimes against a corporation are considered far more serious that violent crime against an individual, yet corporations cannot be held criminally responsible for their actions. If you break in and deface Union Carbide's web site, you could have all of your possessions seized just on suspicion, and spend the rest of your life in prison if convincted. When they killed thousands of people in Bhopal, they got a slap on the wrist.
This situation is nobody's fault, and yet everybody's failing. Our governent is based on popular support, and the will of the people. The way our politicians gauge such support is based on who they hear from, and what they hear. They hear from individuals, and lobbying groups that represent individuals. And under modern US law, corporations are very large and very powerful people, capable of shouting far louder than anyone else.
Abraham Lincoln also said, "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." -- President Abraham Lincoln, letter to William F. Elkins, Nov 21, 1864 (from The Lincoln Encyclopedia [MacMillan, 1950]) (Quote reference thanks to Hank Kalet)
Where do you want to go today?
I don't see the problem.
"Do they owe anything to the people they dump? "
Sure, they owe what the contract promised, no more no less.
Corporations' disregard for their employees is equal to employees' disregard for their employers. Should companies give 3-6 months warning of layoffs? Why the hell should they? How many employees have to give that much notice if they feel like leaving?
Sure, people (including me) can lose a job at short notice. But, we can get a job at short notice. Even 15 years ago, if you left a job voluntarily for no reason better than to have 6 months unpaid chilling out with your family, it would make you unemployable in the eyes of many. Now, you are free to do that kind of thing.
Employees have far more information about the companies they join and work for. They are far more able to determine their employer's health for themselves. They have much better access to their managers. No more big boss on the top floor with the oak desk; most managers, while just as focussed on the bottom line, are far more approachable and forthcoming.
These days, few people would want to go back to the old paternalistic model. The quick hire quick fire culture was spawned as much by tech workers jumping for better pay every 12 months as it was by businesses jiggling their structures every 12 months.
It's the modern world, deal with it.
-----
It is within my lifetime (and I'm only in my 30s) that people were still getting Gold Watches for 50 years of service in a company. If there is a single person of my generation, or younger, who actually remains in work for 50 years, never mind with the same company, I would be amazed.
Jobs have become disposable. And like disposable napkins, they get dumped more with an eye to being rid of them than anything.
Job security has become a joke. Corporations, not Government, dominate the political and legal scenes. Benefits packages have gone from being incentives to whatever the company can get away with. "Fat Cat" bosses get the cream, the workers get the bill.
This was demonstrated in England, about 5 or 6 years ago, during a particularly nasty drought. Yorkshire Water hadn't any. They were trucking emergency supplies in, daily, just to cover the barest essentials of the populace. When rain did fall, it "fell in the wrong areas". The meagre supplies that existed were being lost. 33% of the water was lost, as ancient piping fractured, with negligable maintenance to repair it.
Despite this state of affairs, the CEO of Yorkshire Water awarded himself something like 450,000 pounds (about $800,000) bonus, on top of a hefty pay-rise. Employees were lucky, if they got more than insults from those affected by the drought.
This wasn't an isolated incident, though it did force the British Parliament to consider legislation to prevent senior managers in corporations from soaking up the profits in this way. Never really came to much, though, despite a massive public backlash.
In America, with unions as corrupt as the companies they vie against, there is nobody looking out for the little guys - the ones who actually do the work that allow the company to exist.
Yes, Unions are as much to blame as the CEOs. Unions were initially formed in Britain as a cross between health insurance, unemployment benefits, scam prevention, and health & safety inspection, back in the 1600's. In Britain, at least some have remained fairly true to that vision.
In America, though, it's a different story. Unions have become monsters; frightening distortions of the common-welfare organizations from which they were born. They protect their income, not their members, and instead of curbing the excesses of the corporations, they feed off it. By now, we should have seen a worker uprising against the abuses that are common in the workplace. We haven't. Nor will we. In an environment where back-stabbing is the quickest way to the top, and an expectation of a fair day's wage for a fair day's work is the quickest way out the door, there is nobody willing to stand up on their own. And with nobody backing them, there's no reason for anybody to change their minds.
Monopolies, such as Microsoft's, should be impossible, as employees in different companies put their loyalty in their fellow workers, forcing the conflicting sides to work peacably together, not work to destroy each other. But it's not happening.
Why?
Because not only do companies erode benefits, where possible, and reward employees with festering paranoia, but they also oppose any who stand up to them.
If worker A gets fired, for opposing abuse in the workplace, you're not going to see them get hired by a rival firm. Too risky! This guy's a trouble-maker! Whistle-blowers face a life of being unemployed and unemployable. And, in the ever-tighter restrictions on welfare, the best they can hope for is a room in Cardboard City.
Where are the protests against this inhuman treatment? Where is the Civil Rights Movement, when civil rights in the one place you spend most of your waking hours barely exist at all? Where are the heros of the Working Class?
They don't exist. The average American has long been convinced that people on welfare are scum, unworthy of another thought. Since these are the very people who have most to protest about, America is deaf to their cause and needs. Worse, with a certain George Bush putting his hand in the welfare jar, to pay for his tax cuts & other assorted voter bribes, the voters - the Americans who matter to the politicians - will remain silent.
What does that leave us? Not a whole lot. An article by Jon Katz, a few objections by Slashdotters, but that's all we'll ever see.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Microsoft isn't innocent. They'd rather that it hadn't happened, but they aren't innocent. When a single company takes that large a chunk of the finances of an industry, then it's not innocent when the industry tanks.
But that's a long way from saying that they intended things to happen this way.
In a way, Microsoft is rather like Yahoo and Amazon. They used ballooning stock prices to create a speculative bubble. When the bubble popped, so did most of the industry built around it. And most of the "fault" should go to the stock speculators who blew that bubble so insanely large. Most of them have already been subjected to heavy fines for their part in the fiasco. In this spot I include the employees who were paid in stock options.
One of the groups that should be faulted is the accountants who wrote the rules that allowed taxes to be deferred for employees being paid in stock options. And who allowed the stock being paid to not be charged against the company immediately. Those *** got off scot free, and they certainly didn't deserve to. That was a reasonable benefit for a small company, say with fewer than 50 people. It should have been phased out as the size of the company increased.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
(Dammit -- mod the other one down. That's what I get for posting from unfamiliar machines and not using preview)
Under COBRA (The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) passed by Congress in l985, some laid-off or terminated workers (those fired for reasons other than gross misconduct) are entitled to continuation of health benefits for extended periods of time. COBRA doesn't cover companies with fewer than 20 employees, and it doesn't cover all workers terminated under all circumstances. If the company goes bankrupt, for example, COBRA doesn't apply at all. You have to check and see if you're eligible.)
COBRA, my ass. When I got laid off earlier this year I found out I could keep my health benefits for slightly more than my rent, paid every month.
Oh, and I'm single. That's not even for the "family plan," which was a good _double_ my half of the rent.
Somehow, this doesn't seem like a terribly helpful program to the typical tech worker who's been dropped like a used tampon or a worn out dream.
--saint
What everyone seems to be missing in all the layoff paranoia is the same thing that makes it easy for a company to hire you, makes it easy for them to fire you. America has a very dynamic work force. They transition jobs very quickly. What this means is that jobs are almost continually being created and destroyed. A company can feel free to hire a bunch of people in hopes the demand will be there, because they know if the demand isn't there, they can fire them. Compare this with Europe, where layoffs are extremely discourged by the governments. You have less jobs created, because they know that once they hire people it is extremely hard to fire them. This is what causes the American economy to creat more jobs than most other economies. That is why the American unemployment is typically lower than other countries. So as we lament the ability of companies to lay off American employees, let's not forget that that same ability is what got a large portion of those employees hired in the first place.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Some possibilities:
Maximum warning. Employees ought to have between three and six months' notice before they're laid off, time enough to look for other work in a sane, secure way.
Continued health benefits. Employment used to be a contract: you worked hard for the company, the company took reasonable care of you. Employees who have been with a corporation any length of time at all -- I'd say six months -- ought to keep their health benefits until they find new work, a guarantee not even COBRA provides.
Innovative responses. The layoff has become almost a corporate reflex, a statement to analysts, boards of directors and stockholders that management is lean and mean. When the market drops, capital gets squeezed,or takeovers occur, employment gets slashed. This often seems short-sighted. Tech workers are skilled and valuable. It's difficult to predict the nature of technology, and of consumer attitudes towards technological products and innovation. People laid off today might be urgently needed in six months. Shouldn't they at least have a chance to come up with other tasks, products, functions or ideas before they're booted out?
This would be best done in a collective bargaining situtation which is almost non-existant in the IT sector.
Plenty of professionals have unions (teachers,professors, nurses for example). There is no way this would pass into a law without being so watered down as to be completely ineffective. Don't like the idea of unions? Then maybe you might want to give up your weekend and 8 hour work day, without unions we'd have neither of those.
You know what? When doing restructuring or cost trimming, companies around here actually make a strong effort not to fire anyone - they cut costs with equipment and maintenance, they re-train employees, they shift people from one place to another in the structure instead of firing in one side and hiring on the other side.
For most companies it all boils down to a question of "What is cheaper?", and when the firing of someone is a very expensive option, things like re-training sudenly seem very attractive.
It's not a question of technology, it's a question of society.
(Interestingly enough, in the US the only persons that do get big severance payments seem to be incompetent CEOs and the likes - the ones that put big companies close to bankrupcy usually get the biggest severance payments)
We're all berating companies that are losing money, because the executives lay people off instead of cutting their own salaries.
But I wonder; if you were making less money, which would you get rid of first; cable TV and convenience foods, or the kid that gets $20 to mow your lawn?
Either way, you're putting somebody out of work. How dare you choose not to spend that money.
So some evil executive chooses to cut 1,000 employees who are getting paid $60,000 apiece instead of cutting his $10 million salary by 20%. Never mind that 20% of his salary saves the company $2 million, and firing those 1,000 people saves the company $60 million in salaries alone, not counting the other expenses involved in having a 200 watt heater taking up a few square meters of real estate, no, he's being short-sighted and evil.
If you get laid off, you are out a $60,000 salary, and have to find a new job. It won't be impossible, because prospective employers will understand that you got laid off through no fault of your own.
If the $10 million a year executive refuses to lay you off, however, the shareholders will fire HIM, he'll be out $10 million a year, and it'll be hard for him to find a new job right away because he'll have a reputation for not being willing to follow the will of the people who OWN THE BUSINESS.
So how about instead of griping and bitching about the horrible evil executives trying to fire 1,000 people so they don't have to bankrupt out from under 30,000, and instead concentrate on how you can start putting in a whole day's work for a whole day's pay, instead of being on Slashdot on the company's nickel (yep, I'm guilty too), or printing your resume on the company's laser printers, or taking paper clips home, or stealing coffee filters from the breakroom, or otherwise contributing to the fact that the salary of an employee in this country today is a FRACTION of what it costs to have that employee.
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all of the unhappy people...
I must say, on a more serious note, that I'm in the middle of a great book as I write this that I'd highly recommend to all. It is by Thomas Frank, the author of The Conquest of Cool and Commodify Your Dissent(some essays in it, anyway).
The book is One Market Under God . It is a profoundly engaging read, and discusses more than the matter of the eroding social contract that Katz touches on (and someone else rightly notes has been worsening over decades). It really delves deeply into mid-to-late 90s "New Economy" mythology- examining the religious texts of the myth (FastCompany, RedHerring, Wired (esp. Kevin Kelly's insufferable and blasphemous revisitations of the original luciferic lie itself, we-shall-be-as-gods!)), the Gods of the religion (the dotcom wunderkinds, the new economy billionaires, the venture capitalists, etc.), the mad prophets of the religion (Tom Peters et al), and of course, the religion itself- our New Economy!
HIGHLY recommended.
Making it expensive, difficult, or impossible to fire employees has major drawbacks. Put bluntly, the more difficult you make it to fire an employee, the more difficult it is to hire. The reason for this is quite simple, the costs in the event that an employee becomes unnecessary tend to far exceed the marginal benefits bestowed on the company by producing more goods or services. When the employee is productive, just small sliver of the revenues go back to the shareholders as profits. When an employee is unproductive, and continuees to be employed, their wage comes right off the companies bottom line. In other words, unless an employeer is damn sure that the demand for more goods and services will remain steady (or grow), they will NOT hire.
The end result is that:
The unemployed (all employees in effect) have a harder time finding work and moving around.
The employer has a difficult time staffing.
The shareholder has his profits pinched AND diminished.
The consumer (which we all are ultimately) has less buying power because the companies from which they buy goods are inefficient.
In the long run, the available work pool is also diminished because many workers that would otherwise be available are employed inefficiently [which is exactly what "your" laws do, almost by definition, because "you" feel the need to make it artificially expensive to shift employees around.]
Translation: It's really not good for anyone in the long run.
The most you can say is that in the short run it may sound good for the CURRENTLY EMPLOYED employee. However, when you look at this from an empirical perspective (e.g., unemployment figures in left-leaning countries), it's not good at all.
Now this is not to say that I support all firing and lay-offs. Firstly, I believe there IS a certain moral obligation to the employees, to try to look out for them, where it can be done reasonably. Secondly, there are indeed times when it makes more economic sense for a company to continue employing people even when they cannot be employed efficiently in the short run, but this is not what these leftist laws suggest. An employer that is looking out for his companies interests would (generally) do this automatically, assuming he is generally rational (which is a pretty fundamental underpinning of modern economic theory). The only reasonable difference these left-leaning laws can hope to make is that might prevent the employer from exercising his good judgement.