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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.
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!
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.
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?
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)
(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
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)