Layoffs are immoral?

Tuesday, May 26 2009

Layoffs are immoral?

When Layoffs Are Immoral - The Moral of the Story Blog - NYTimes.com

In mid-May, British Global Services announced 15,000 job cuts, while Japan’s Sony continued cutting 16,000 jobs. Here in the U.S., 5.7 million jobs have been lost since the recession began in December 2007. To cite one example, Caterpillar, the heavy equipment manufacturer, is moving to layoff more than 20,000 workers. These days such mass layoffs are sadly unsurprising, but are they ethical?

They are not, at least until more benign tactics have been exhausted. To deprive thousands of people of their livelihood can have a catastrophic effect on them, their families and their communities. For a company to get through a recession, suffering may be unavoidable, but ethical management means minimizing that hardship, spreading the pain equitably and bearing some responsibility for its consequences.

I’ve repeatedly (and quite recently) felt the pain of losing one’s livelihood - and in many cases after working as a freelancer but with the expectations: I am responsible for the company’s well-being, I must do whatever it takes to get the job done and If something goes wrong, I dropped the ball. What I’ve always found unreasonable about that relationship is that the company puts so much responsibility in my hands without taking any responsibility for any aspect of my life. Have you ever been in a fucked-up relationship with someone who is a pathological narcissist (among other things)? That’s what it’s like working in modern corporate America, it seems.

What I know is that the law requires companies to hold little to zero responsiblity for the well-being of its workers… it only requires a minimum compensation for time worked, virtually everything else written into law has a loophole (behold permalancers!), and even the minimum wage is widely ignored when possible.

As for society in general… it seems no-one, job or no job, feels any responsibility or moral obligation to speak up to enforce equitable profits and equitable losses among investors, equity holders, management, and staff workers. Every man/woman for himself! Everyone’s idea of a career nowadays is “take orders, get paid, CYA”. No one strategizes about their own careers, or their departments, or the state of the company or the economy. So, no wonder it’s chaos out there.

I think collective action is one way to fix this; to see that every major management decision made would not shift the entire weight of a company as a leveraging force against one dissenting or victimized employee; to enforce fair fortune and misfortune sharing (and prevent overweighted executive salaries, excessive profit taking, etc.); to fight in defense of something other than just bargaining for the sake of employee benefits, but a sustainable economic progression for these large organizations where there are so many stakeholders (and so few people at the wheel, most of them steering for their own agendas). I think legal guidelines would be a sloppy way to get all of this done, but collective action fits the bill.

What do you think?

Years ago, when they had one of their first rounds of layoffs, Amazon talked about issuing stock options to the laid-off workers—the idea being if they were truly helping the company by being removed from the payroll, they should reap some reward if the strategy worked. I don’t know if the company ever continued that program, or even if it was regarded as a success, but it is an interesting idea.