It has links and everything to the laws, a little explanation of what processes and who is protected and some other things. The important part is that it says you are entitled to compensation if you weren't fired or terminated without a "good" cause.
There's the problem. Defining a "good" cause is subjective.
So there are some situations where you can quit and still receive benefits.
Camel, eye of needle, etc. You practically have to have video of someone sexually harassing/physically assaulting you in order to retain benefits after a voluntary quit.
I suggest you should look at it a little better while keeping an open mind. Anything the UI collects in their determination is available to you too. So what ever the employer represents as a reason or any so called evidence to why you should be denied is available to you. You can file for appeals or hearing and you should be able to get 3 or so before having to goto court. Also there are some lawyers who will pick this up for a small percentage of the back pay (i think the states toss cash their way too)
I have far more experience with this system than you do, having been through it more than once. I had a temp agency fight my claim because I wouldn't take a 12 hour overnight shift on 3 hours notice, in a field that I have no experience in. A my-word-against-theirs situation, and they won. They didn't have to provide any documentation, they just gave their say-so. And even if they did, said documentation would be easily enough created out of thin air. For example: A manager their could have said that in a closed-door meeting, I threatened their life. My word against theirs. They could create as much back-dated evidence as they wanted and I wouldn't be able to prove that it was invalid.
As far as finding a pattern is concerned, the state has far better things to do than track that. They also have no motivation to do so, since denying benefits saves them money. They still get the benefit of being able to provide businesses with desperate potential employees who will take insulting wages for shit jobs since they have basically no choice. (Have you ever seen the list of positions that an unemployment office keeps? Most of the stuff is euphemisms for 'heavy lifting' or 'office bitch').
The system is stacked against the employee no matter which way you look at it. At least having to provide a reason and documentation at the time of termination would keep employers from going through the trouble of forging said documentation, and prevent them from firing people for no good reason.
And if your product is considered "mission critical", I would expect a data corruption bug to be fixed within 24 hours. Even if it is nothing more than rolling back the recent patches and re-issuing the previous version.
Which conveniently results in all bugs being filed as 'mission critical'. It's like the people who send every email message they send out with 'highest' importance; everyone thinks that their stuff is the most important thing you'll do all day.
File for unemployment compensation and they will have to provide a reason. If it is a discriminatory one or what ever, there will be signs of it going on before you are fired. Lets say one supervisor has fired all blacks working under him and has an all white division. Lets say that the minorities are the only ones doing the physical labor or only the white people are the ones promoted to management.
I think you might be missing my point. Your former employer can go into that hearing and spin a bullshit story about your attitude problem / poor attendance / poor performance / whatever, and you can't prove otherwise. Who's going to prove they're lying? Who's got more credibility, you with your laziness and your bad attitude or the good employer who's providing a living for members of the community?
There's nothing to keep them from lying their asses off and keep you from getting your unemployment benefits. Unless you've been documenting everything all along (which in itself could get you fired for being disloyal) you're shit out of luck. It's your word against theirs, and who are they going to believe?
This tends to change with a variety of factors. For instance, the employee handbook and internal company policy in most cases provide for severance pay and restricts the ability to let you go except for certain reasons. This hand book or internal company policy is viewed as a contract by most all courts and would supersede the states requirements if they are less.
The employee handbook is there for the convenience of the employer. When there is a wrongful termination suit, they can point to the relevant part of the employee handbook and say "See? We told them." This results from the burden of proof being on the ex-employee to prove the circumstances under which the termination was unlawful. Getting said proof involves lawyers, who are expensive. Since you pay those legal fees whether you win or not, it tips the playing field seriously in the favor of the employer (who can probably afford an attorney a lot more than your newly unemployed ass can.)
Now unemployment can be contested for any reason but, they have to have a reason to fire you. I'm in Ohio where you don't necessarily get unemployment if they had reason to fire you. It has to be a good reason too. They can fight it all they want but at most, they will only delay when you receive the unemployment if they don't have a substantial reason to fire you.
Wrong. Termination does not require cause in an at-will employment jurisdiction. Your employer is fully within their rights to terminate you for any reason whatsoever, or no stated reason. If you do manage to get them in front of an unemployment board hearing, there's really nothing to keep them from using a minor (or fictional) infraction to justify your termination. Even if they're flat-out lying, how are you going to prove it? They're not giving sworn testimony, and they don't have the weight of perjury hanging over them. At least in this state, if you lose your hearing, your only recourse is through the courts, and who has money for that when you're out of work?
While technically true, it is wrong to some degree. Even in Massachusetts, contract law is just that. You might not have a job at company X because of the At-Will status but that doesn't mean you don't have recourse.
Oh no you don't. "You're fired." "Why?" "Don't have to tell you, bye." Where's the recourse? You can't argue with "we just don't like you anymore". Unless there's been a repeated (and carefully documented) pattern of blatantly discriminatory behavior, that's pretty much the end of that.
The bottom line is there is more recourse then people think. They are often discouraged in taking some of that recourse because of funding or they just don't know about it or it becomes a hassle or they have already moved on or what ever. Of course there are some people who are just disgruntled and they did get fired for a good reason (even when they don't think it is). They don't or won't have recourse or as much. Every situation is somewhat unique so there probably isn't a blanket X-Y= settlement.
The bottom line is, you can be fired at any moment for no reason, and proving that there WAS a reason despite your former employer's claims to the contrary is horrendously difficult and expensive.
The solution to this problem is to require a reason and documentation for an involuntary termination. The documentation could be pretty much anything, but having some documentation and a reason means that said reason can be refuted. Without someplace to start, good fucking luck proving that there was ANY reason for your termination, let alone an illegal/discriminatory one.
I don't think your example is relevant to most U.S. readers. In Canada (and most other civilized countries) workers actually have some rights regarding recourse for termination and unfair labor practices. In my state (Massachusetts) pretty much the only rights you have are these:
1) Timely payment of wages (enforceable by the Attorney General, as well as your own lawyer for triple damages) 2) Minimum wage ($8 as of the first of the year, still a fucking joke) 3) The right to take a twelve week leave without pay for childbirth/adoption 4) The right to quit a job without notice 5)... That's pretty much it.
No right to severance, regardless of length of employ. No right to appeal a termination. No right to notice of a termination. Around here they don't even have to give a reason for firing you. They can just tell you some day "You're fired, get out" without any further information. I actually had someone tell me "We don't have to tell you" when I asked why I was being let go. Your ex-employer can also fight your unemployment claim for no reason whatsoever other than it makes their unemployment insurance premiums go up.
As far as IP goes, everything you produce during your employ belongs to the employer if they so choose. Sure, you can fight it (and they may not have a right to it, depending on the interpretation of the applicable law) but lawyers are expensive.
Even employment contracts that give you more rights than the law requires are unenforceable in this state. At-will employment trumps all of them. Your employer basically has impunity to screw you 17 ways without so much as buying you a drink first.
It got modded up because it raises the spectre of Comcast attempting to block political speech either deliberately or as collateral damage from their ham-fisted attempts to block a protocol that "might" be used to distribute illegal material.
Of course, if you had put any thought into your comment at all, you 1) wouldn't be posting as an AC and 2) wouldn't be dismissing someone's comments as "retarded" just becuase their political philosophy is different from yours.
I'm in Massachusetts, which, like lots of others, is an "at-will" employment state. An employee can be terminated for no reason whatsoever. If the ex-employee believes that he/she has been terminated for discriminatory reasons (ie your gay/homophobe scenario) the burden of proof is on them if they decide to file suit. Knowing why you've been fired and proving it are two very different things.
What it boils down to, is if someone wants you gone, you're gone. They don't need to give you or anyone else a reason for the termination.
I agree that "reasonable" is definitely a damagingly subjective description. What I consider reasonable is not what you would, etc.
However, the current batch of idiots isn't even TRYING to find some middle ground. They've decided that in the absence of objective criteria for definitively removing the problem, they're going to go with the actions that give them the most control over the populace (and, consequently, their money.)
[tinfoil]Osama isn't being brought to justice or killed because he's far more useful to the US government as a bogeyman. They can use him to justify just about any horror you can imagine (torture, murder, forced labor, so forth) in the name of "national security". What they're really doing is lining their own pockets. They can stay safe and secure in their panic-room-equipped mansions while enjoying the protection of the US Military, on the taxpayer dollar.[/tinfoil]
The trouble with your statement is that, with a few egregious exceptions (mostly centered around sexual harassment lawsuits or corporate espionage) nobody ever gets in trouble for violating IT policy. A policy that doesn't get enforced is no policy at all.
Sure, the employee handbook might say "violations of policy will result in punishment up to and including termination", but when was the last time you heard about someone repeatedly ignoring IT policy or instruction and getting fired for it? The most common example I can come up with is queue sizes on Outlook. Sure, the policy might say "your queue cannot exceed XX MB, after that transfer to a local.PST", but then when the Vice President In Charge Of Things That Begin With H On Alternate Tuesdays violates the policy, and steadfastly refuses to do anything about it despite causing multiple helpdesk calls/space problems on the Exchange server, what happens? IT gets told to ignore it. This precedent flows downhill, and soon everyone ignores the policy because they know it's toothless.
IT policies will be followed when the IT manager can go to an executive and say "You're fired for repeated violations of IT policy. No severance package for you, we're terminating you for cause." Until then, IT policies have all the teeth of an amoeba.
As someone who's worked in operating rooms, that figure doesn't even get a double blink from me. Seriously, that's not that bad, and depending on the nature of the surgery and the narcotic painkillers typically required afterwards, it can actually be less expensive.
But then again, perhaps I'm too stupid to see how the bittorrent protocol is being used legally.
Linux distributions. Software demos.
Guess you're right about being too stupid. Using your argument, you could try to make thumbtacks illegal because people might use them to hang up pictures of copyrighted images that the user hasn't paid for. BT is a tool, not a philosophy.
Also, you might want to look up the Betamax decision while you're at it. The movie industry tried to make home VCRs illegal, but the courts decided that there were 'sufficient non-infringing uses' of the technology and denied their request. I'd call downloading Ubuntu sufficiently non-infringing.
You *almost* had a point there, before you descended into Godwin-scale name-calling.
The rest of us on the left would have been satisfied with the first sentence, it stands up on its own. Not everyone on the right is so crazy about what we're doing w/r/t foreign policy; in other words, lots of them aren't blindingly stupid, just have different views.
Because if you think military contractors are corrupt, you clearly haven't spent any time reading the financial section of your favorite newspaper. The private sector guys would find a way to generate massive pollutants and dump them in the nearest water supply, then take off for the nearest banana republic without an extradition treaty.
Say what you like about the military, when they set out to solve a problem, it bloody well gets solved.
Solar power is what will solve our energy problems. Period. It's way too abundant to be ignored.
Oh and all of you proposing that more nuclear power plants will help? That's a fine idea in principle, but I *dare* you to find a public or private agency that you trust to run the bloody things safely, or to handle the waste in a sanely safe manner.
Allow personal information on tens of thousands of people to get out due to massive incompetence, costing the state millions and potentially ruining the credit of everyone whose info was on the tape, lose a weeks' vacation.
Share music online at no cost of any sort to the copyright holders, and then get railroaded through an ignorant and corrupt legal system, and get fined several times your yearly salary.
I'm firmly convinced that my body contents are even less of my company's business than my home contents. I show up sober and ready to go. What happened with me over the weekend is none of their concern, as long as I'm not handing out their properties.
Your company may not care, but their liability insurance company sure as hell cares. After all, your odds of losing an arm in some freak spreadsheet accident are ten times higher if you smoked a joint 45 days ago. (Current widely used testing can't distinguish between someone who smoked a joint 6 weeks ago and someone who's stoned when he/she takes the test.)
To stay on topic, kinda: I'm reminded of a Dilbert cartoon that's posted here in the cube farm. The company offers free blood pressure screenings, and when Dilbert's comes out below the company average, his workload is increased to bring it in line. The punchline is "How long did you think you could get away with that?"
Using this kind of biofeedback to monitor stress levels will lead to the same situation; nevermind that people are different and react differently to stress. According to management, we're all interchangable parts with the same skills and attributes, and can be treated like property.
All things being equal, I would agree; it's not a private institution's job to enforce federal regulation.
However, HIPPA is a very fucking scary piece of legislation. If the hospital isn't doing EVERYTHING in its power to determine who's leaking this information, the patient and/or the patient's family (or survivors) can sue the hospital into oblivion. It's in the hospital's financial interest to destroy this guy by any means necessary (both because they'll lose business from negative publicity and the fear of a civil suit); whether it's 'right' or 'wrong' never enters into the discussion.
This leaves aside the fact that the hospital should actually FIX things if they don't like what's being said (and if it's even partially true). It's kind of like the RIAA trying to solve the problem of declining record sales; instead of fixing what's wrong (the product sucks, CDs are an order of magnitude too expensive), they try to use the courts to enforce the status quo.
Now why don't you explain why we're not in the Sudan, if it's not 'because they have no oil'.
Also, there's really no need to call people names when it's just as easy to politely correct them. You don't know me, yet you've already assumed that I'm an 'uneducated moron'. There's a difference between not knowing a single fact and being an 'uneducated moron'. Just like there's a difference between correcting somebody and being rude.
I agree. It's a meatspace problem. However, software can go a long way towards improving the situation, if it's allowed to. It shouldn't be possible to weaken security. Shouldn't even have the option. And it should be a terminable offense to attempt to do so, just the same as if you tried to hack your own company's machine.
So we fix the users. I'm really sick of the prevailing attitude that "you're not going to change the users, so we have to accept this." Bullshit. In a civilized society, there must be consequences for stupidity.
Users must be protected from themselves for the good of the whole. We don't allow people to drive 100MPH on the highway. We don't allow people to shout 'fire' in a crowded theater. What are people going to do, not use their computers? We're way past that point. The PC has become as important to our current way of life as indoor plumbing. We wouldn't tolerate the attitude of "Stupid toilet! Why do I have to flush it?"
Maybe what we should do is create an anonymous forum for blowing the whistle on people who refuse to take security seriously, with an emphasis on this behavior on the part of officers of publicly traded companies. I bet the stockholders would want to know if the CEO's password is 'password'.
I think there's another factor at work here that doesn't seem to be being considered. Employees actually have rights in Europe, whereas our very survival is at the whim of the employer on this side of the pond. Most states are "at-will" employment states over here, which means that you can be fired for no reason at all, and frequently be denied unemployment benefits on a pretense. (I've had this happen to me; a temp agency offered me a gig that I was unable to accept for safety reasons, and I was denied unemployment coverage because I 'refused work'. In this state temp agencies are obligated to contribute to unemployment coverage the same as any other employer, and the more people you lay off, the more you pay to UI. This makes screwing over its former employees in the agency's financial interest.) Even if it's an illegal termination (discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation (in some states)), proving it in court is IMMENSELY difficult, as the burden of proof is on the employee. The employer has the ability to say "There is no stated reason for that termination. We're not obligated to give one."
Why is this relevant to the discussion? Because being unemployed is expensive. Unemployment benefits in this state amount to 50% of the highest salary you received in the last 18 months, and only last 6 months maximum. (There's a fairly insultingly small extension to those if you can prove you're in state-approved job training.) As I understand it, this state is on the generous side of average for the US. Most workers try to squirrel away 3 months' salary, and not all of them succeed in doing so because of the costs of living. American employers are not required to offer ANYTHING in the way of severance pay, with the exception of compensation for vacation time earned but not used. (And there are ways around that; they just call it something else other than 'vacation time'.) American employers also are not obligated to contribute anything towards a pension or other retirement vehicle, with the exception of Social Security. (Employers and employees are each required to contribute 7% of the employees' pre-tax income.) Social Security at this point essentially amounts to a 7% decrease in income, as by the time most/. readers retire it will be bankrupt, thanks to the Baby Boomers' insurmountable sense of entitlement.
Employees in the US generally are worse off than our EU counterparts for the above stated reasons. Add more stuff in like about half as much vacation time, frequently no sick/personal time, no paid leave for childbirth/medical issues (except where the employer voluntarily carries disability insurance), and it's bleak indeed.
Here's a question though: How good are EU employers in general about providing training to IT workers? Over here it seems like a lot of places would rather rip an arm off than provide useful training.
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As far as finding a pattern is concerned, the state has far better things to do than track that. They also have no motivation to do so, since denying benefits saves them money. They still get the benefit of being able to provide businesses with desperate potential employees who will take insulting wages for shit jobs since they have basically no choice. (Have you ever seen the list of positions that an unemployment office keeps? Most of the stuff is euphemisms for 'heavy lifting' or 'office bitch').
The system is stacked against the employee no matter which way you look at it. At least having to provide a reason and documentation at the time of termination would keep employers from going through the trouble of forging said documentation, and prevent them from firing people for no good reason.
There's nothing to keep them from lying their asses off and keep you from getting your unemployment benefits. Unless you've been documenting everything all along (which in itself could get you fired for being disloyal) you're shit out of luck. It's your word against theirs, and who are they going to believe?
The solution to this problem is to require a reason and documentation for an involuntary termination. The documentation could be pretty much anything, but having some documentation and a reason means that said reason can be refuted. Without someplace to start, good fucking luck proving that there was ANY reason for your termination, let alone an illegal/discriminatory one.
I don't think your example is relevant to most U.S. readers. In Canada (and most other civilized countries) workers actually have some rights regarding recourse for termination and unfair labor practices. In my state (Massachusetts) pretty much the only rights you have are these:
... That's pretty much it.
1) Timely payment of wages (enforceable by the Attorney General, as well as your own lawyer for triple damages)
2) Minimum wage ($8 as of the first of the year, still a fucking joke)
3) The right to take a twelve week leave without pay for childbirth/adoption
4) The right to quit a job without notice
5)
No right to severance, regardless of length of employ. No right to appeal a termination. No right to notice of a termination. Around here they don't even have to give a reason for firing you. They can just tell you some day "You're fired, get out" without any further information. I actually had someone tell me "We don't have to tell you" when I asked why I was being let go. Your ex-employer can also fight your unemployment claim for no reason whatsoever other than it makes their unemployment insurance premiums go up.
As far as IP goes, everything you produce during your employ belongs to the employer if they so choose. Sure, you can fight it (and they may not have a right to it, depending on the interpretation of the applicable law) but lawyers are expensive.
Even employment contracts that give you more rights than the law requires are unenforceable in this state. At-will employment trumps all of them. Your employer basically has impunity to screw you 17 ways without so much as buying you a drink first.
It got modded up because it raises the spectre of Comcast attempting to block political speech either deliberately or as collateral damage from their ham-fisted attempts to block a protocol that "might" be used to distribute illegal material.
Of course, if you had put any thought into your comment at all, you 1) wouldn't be posting as an AC and 2) wouldn't be dismissing someone's comments as "retarded" just becuase their political philosophy is different from yours.
I'm in Massachusetts, which, like lots of others, is an "at-will" employment state. An employee can be terminated for no reason whatsoever. If the ex-employee believes that he/she has been terminated for discriminatory reasons (ie your gay/homophobe scenario) the burden of proof is on them if they decide to file suit. Knowing why you've been fired and proving it are two very different things.
What it boils down to, is if someone wants you gone, you're gone. They don't need to give you or anyone else a reason for the termination.
That might be, but if I understand you right, the IT policy violations weren't the *primary* reason for the manager wanting to terminate someone.
Where are you that a manager needs a reason to fire someone? Here we're all 'at-will' employees and can be fired at any time for no reason.
I agree that "reasonable" is definitely a damagingly subjective description. What I consider reasonable is not what you would, etc.
However, the current batch of idiots isn't even TRYING to find some middle ground. They've decided that in the absence of objective criteria for definitively removing the problem, they're going to go with the actions that give them the most control over the populace (and, consequently, their money.)
[tinfoil]Osama isn't being brought to justice or killed because he's far more useful to the US government as a bogeyman. They can use him to justify just about any horror you can imagine (torture, murder, forced labor, so forth) in the name of "national security". What they're really doing is lining their own pockets. They can stay safe and secure in their panic-room-equipped mansions while enjoying the protection of the US Military, on the taxpayer dollar.[/tinfoil]
The trouble with your statement is that, with a few egregious exceptions (mostly centered around sexual harassment lawsuits or corporate espionage) nobody ever gets in trouble for violating IT policy. A policy that doesn't get enforced is no policy at all.
.PST", but then when the Vice President In Charge Of Things That Begin With H On Alternate Tuesdays violates the policy, and steadfastly refuses to do anything about it despite causing multiple helpdesk calls/space problems on the Exchange server, what happens? IT gets told to ignore it. This precedent flows downhill, and soon everyone ignores the policy because they know it's toothless.
Sure, the employee handbook might say "violations of policy will result in punishment up to and including termination", but when was the last time you heard about someone repeatedly ignoring IT policy or instruction and getting fired for it? The most common example I can come up with is queue sizes on Outlook. Sure, the policy might say "your queue cannot exceed XX MB, after that transfer to a local
IT policies will be followed when the IT manager can go to an executive and say "You're fired for repeated violations of IT policy. No severance package for you, we're terminating you for cause." Until then, IT policies have all the teeth of an amoeba.
As someone who's worked in operating rooms, that figure doesn't even get a double blink from me. Seriously, that's not that bad, and depending on the nature of the surgery and the narcotic painkillers typically required afterwards, it can actually be less expensive.
Software demos.
Guess you're right about being too stupid. Using your argument, you could try to make thumbtacks illegal because people might use them to hang up pictures of copyrighted images that the user hasn't paid for. BT is a tool, not a philosophy.
Also, you might want to look up the Betamax decision while you're at it. The movie industry tried to make home VCRs illegal, but the courts decided that there were 'sufficient non-infringing uses' of the technology and denied their request. I'd call downloading Ubuntu sufficiently non-infringing.
You *almost* had a point there, before you descended into Godwin-scale name-calling.
The rest of us on the left would have been satisfied with the first sentence, it stands up on its own. Not everyone on the right is so crazy about what we're doing w/r/t foreign policy; in other words, lots of them aren't blindingly stupid, just have different views.
That's not really fair; removing the President from office is a little out of their main line of work.
Because if you think military contractors are corrupt, you clearly haven't spent any time reading the financial section of your favorite newspaper. The private sector guys would find a way to generate massive pollutants and dump them in the nearest water supply, then take off for the nearest banana republic without an extradition treaty.
Say what you like about the military, when they set out to solve a problem, it bloody well gets solved.
Solar power is what will solve our energy problems. Period. It's way too abundant to be ignored.
Oh and all of you proposing that more nuclear power plants will help? That's a fine idea in principle, but I *dare* you to find a public or private agency that you trust to run the bloody things safely, or to handle the waste in a sanely safe manner.
Hmm.
Allow personal information on tens of thousands of people to get out due to massive incompetence, costing the state millions and potentially ruining the credit of everyone whose info was on the tape, lose a weeks' vacation.
Share music online at no cost of any sort to the copyright holders, and then get railroaded through an ignorant and corrupt legal system, and get fined several times your yearly salary.
Is Canada hiring?
To stay on topic, kinda: I'm reminded of a Dilbert cartoon that's posted here in the cube farm. The company offers free blood pressure screenings, and when Dilbert's comes out below the company average, his workload is increased to bring it in line. The punchline is "How long did you think you could get away with that?"
Using this kind of biofeedback to monitor stress levels will lead to the same situation; nevermind that people are different and react differently to stress. According to management, we're all interchangable parts with the same skills and attributes, and can be treated like property.
All things being equal, I would agree; it's not a private institution's job to enforce federal regulation.
However, HIPPA is a very fucking scary piece of legislation. If the hospital isn't doing EVERYTHING in its power to determine who's leaking this information, the patient and/or the patient's family (or survivors) can sue the hospital into oblivion. It's in the hospital's financial interest to destroy this guy by any means necessary (both because they'll lose business from negative publicity and the fear of a civil suit); whether it's 'right' or 'wrong' never enters into the discussion.
This leaves aside the fact that the hospital should actually FIX things if they don't like what's being said (and if it's even partially true). It's kind of like the RIAA trying to solve the problem of declining record sales; instead of fixing what's wrong (the product sucks, CDs are an order of magnitude too expensive), they try to use the courts to enforce the status quo.
Thanks for the info.
Now why don't you explain why we're not in the Sudan, if it's not 'because they have no oil'.
Also, there's really no need to call people names when it's just as easy to politely correct them. You don't know me, yet you've already assumed that I'm an 'uneducated moron'. There's a difference between not knowing a single fact and being an 'uneducated moron'. Just like there's a difference between correcting somebody and being rude.
Two words: No oil.
I agree. It's a meatspace problem. However, software can go a long way towards improving the situation, if it's allowed to. It shouldn't be possible to weaken security. Shouldn't even have the option. And it should be a terminable offense to attempt to do so, just the same as if you tried to hack your own company's machine.
So we fix the users. I'm really sick of the prevailing attitude that "you're not going to change the users, so we have to accept this." Bullshit. In a civilized society, there must be consequences for stupidity.
Users must be protected from themselves for the good of the whole. We don't allow people to drive 100MPH on the highway. We don't allow people to shout 'fire' in a crowded theater. What are people going to do, not use their computers? We're way past that point. The PC has become as important to our current way of life as indoor plumbing. We wouldn't tolerate the attitude of "Stupid toilet! Why do I have to flush it?"
Maybe what we should do is create an anonymous forum for blowing the whistle on people who refuse to take security seriously, with an emphasis on this behavior on the part of officers of publicly traded companies. I bet the stockholders would want to know if the CEO's password is 'password'.
The key phrase there is "in the next few years". Training costs money NOW, with no benefit NOW. Any benefit past the next two quarters is meaningless.
I think there's another factor at work here that doesn't seem to be being considered. Employees actually have rights in Europe, whereas our very survival is at the whim of the employer on this side of the pond. Most states are "at-will" employment states over here, which means that you can be fired for no reason at all, and frequently be denied unemployment benefits on a pretense. (I've had this happen to me; a temp agency offered me a gig that I was unable to accept for safety reasons, and I was denied unemployment coverage because I 'refused work'. In this state temp agencies are obligated to contribute to unemployment coverage the same as any other employer, and the more people you lay off, the more you pay to UI. This makes screwing over its former employees in the agency's financial interest.) Even if it's an illegal termination (discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation (in some states)), proving it in court is IMMENSELY difficult, as the burden of proof is on the employee. The employer has the ability to say "There is no stated reason for that termination. We're not obligated to give one."
/. readers retire it will be bankrupt, thanks to the Baby Boomers' insurmountable sense of entitlement.
Why is this relevant to the discussion? Because being unemployed is expensive. Unemployment benefits in this state amount to 50% of the highest salary you received in the last 18 months, and only last 6 months maximum. (There's a fairly insultingly small extension to those if you can prove you're in state-approved job training.) As I understand it, this state is on the generous side of average for the US. Most workers try to squirrel away 3 months' salary, and not all of them succeed in doing so because of the costs of living. American employers are not required to offer ANYTHING in the way of severance pay, with the exception of compensation for vacation time earned but not used. (And there are ways around that; they just call it something else other than 'vacation time'.) American employers also are not obligated to contribute anything towards a pension or other retirement vehicle, with the exception of Social Security. (Employers and employees are each required to contribute 7% of the employees' pre-tax income.) Social Security at this point essentially amounts to a 7% decrease in income, as by the time most
Employees in the US generally are worse off than our EU counterparts for the above stated reasons. Add more stuff in like about half as much vacation time, frequently no sick/personal time, no paid leave for childbirth/medical issues (except where the employer voluntarily carries disability insurance), and it's bleak indeed.
Here's a question though: How good are EU employers in general about providing training to IT workers? Over here it seems like a lot of places would rather rip an arm off than provide useful training.