>we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving.
In my country, this action would be literally illegal.
Even in countries where it isn’t, it feels highly immoral. “I’m not in any kind of pressure to do this but I’m choosing to shed the people who created my wealth for greater personal gain”.
This is part of the reason why American tech companies are so successful though. Being unable to lay off workers causes stagnation at companies where fast-development is paramount.
That helps, but there's a reason why the collective economy of the EU has produced only like 1/10 the number of unicorns over the past 30 years despite their GDP being around 2/3 the US's
And yet we live longer and with higher quality of life, by most standards (chronic and mental illnesses, life expectancy, etc).
No need to turn it into a dick measuring context, we have plenty of flaws of our own.
Just pointing out that legal or not, under most morals systems, loudly proclaiming that you’re willing to screw your people for no clear necessity will get you socially ostracized.
>If the business is not able to be profitable everyone is screwed.
Sure, we agree there. It’s not like needing profitability is a weird quirk of the American system. I am not criticizing the layoffs, but the layoffs while mentioning business is booming and they have no reasons forcing their hand.
I’m curious about your point of view, would you applaud and support your employer taking this attitude? Firing half the workers while agreeing that there is no pressure to let anyone go looks good to you?
I actually was laid off by Block, about eleven months ago. I got slightly less severance than these folks.
I wasn’t at all upset that they chose to lay me off. I wouldn’t have felt any guilt about leaving that job when it was no longer economically beneficial to me, so why would I expect anything different from them? This is a business transaction, I’m selling labor, I’m not entitled to a buyer. The outrage over layoffs seems so bizarre to me.
> would you applaud and support your employer taking this attitude?
I don’t see my employer as an owner or steward of me. I think we are in business relationship where both sides win. If circumstances change I understand I may need to find a new job.
>I don’t see my employer as an owner or steward of me.
They don’t need to be. You can both recognize a freedom to do something and yet consider it wrong.
The fact that you and your employer both are approaching a negotiation freely does not make the relationship balanced.
If you leave a company of 10k people, the CEO will not be waking up the next morning in anxiety wondering how to feed their children. If said CEO fires 5k people, many of the fired workers will. A business owner who is not aware and respectful of this fact is not acting morally.
Are you glad to have people spending their lives on jobs that don't contribute to society, just because the business is already profitable? Wouldn't it be better to have those people move into whatever job would contribute more to society? Have you considered that allowing people to remain in jobs that contribute less than they could in other jobs is the reason why your per-capita production lags the US?
The goal of the economy should be to move people quickly to where they can do the most good for society. Note that this has little to do with how hard these folks are working, how smart they are, or how 'worthy' they are. The point is just to have people doing the most useful work.
Great point, thanks god we’re eliminating the majority of the creative arts industry with dogshit ai slop so people with actual talent can be redeployed to DoorDash or whatever (I guess until driverless cars can take that over?)
I can, easily. Speaking for my country and assuming you are not on a fixed-term contract, you can only get fired for one of the three reasons:
1. Company's in financial trouble and forced to downsize.
2. The position becomes obsolete and there's no option to transition you into some other role. In this case, the company can't hire anyone with a similar-enough skillset to yours for at least a year (or maybe even longer, I'm not sure).
3. Gross incompetence, in which case you need to be given an opportunity to course correct via a few documented warnings before being fired. Every warning requires your signature so that the company can't just make them up and backdate them.
That said, you don't become a permanent employee on day one, a company can issue up to three fixed-term contract before being forced to give you a permanent one. If you're on a fixed-term contract, they can just not extend it without having to satisfy any of the criteria above. But after a maximum of 3 years at the same company (as the maximum length for a fixed-term contract is one year), the criteria for firing you increases drastically.
So, the only way this could happen in my country is if the company stops renewing fixed-term contracts for recent employees, but then it wouldn't all be at the same time and you'd get the hint before the time comes to plan accordingly.
People don't want to leak their personal information, duh. The country they are from is another bit of information that you can't take back from the internet once published. Why would you do that?
This is also why your countries social welfare systems are teetering on fiscal insolvency and deficits are ballooning.
Your inefficient and non-competitive private sector isn't growing fast enough to fund your growing demand for free stuff in the public sector.
Maybe if companies and entrepreneurs were allowed to shift more rapidly to meet market demand your legacy giants (and social welfare meal ticket) wouldn't be sitting ducks for the Chinese to swoop in and kill.
Many European countries, including mine (spain) only accept mass firings when the company proves it’s a necessity. Usually this means showing losses or the effect of force majeure events like natural disasters.
You can manage your company just fine, by not overshooting your hiring by 2x if workers were anctually unneeded for example.
But in your country (Spain), Telefónica de España laid off 3649 workers in Dec 2023 (about 40% of that unit) despite growing net income by 17% that year.
Nice googling, but that’s just an example that proves my point.
They had to go through a process extensively justifying losses (mostly that certain jobs were no longer relevant as they were pre-digital workforce), negotiate with unions and offer voluntary leaving conditions.
The resulting offer was good enough that more workers applied to be fired than were necesssary. For context, the deal was basically to pay them 70% of their current salary from the dismissal moment until their retirement at 63.
spain has the highest unemployment rate in the EU. maybe you are ignoring important tradeoffs and are a little too confident about your own opinion on what it means to "manage your company just fine"
Maybe, or maybe you’re about to find out what happens to the consumer side when a large percentage of companies decide they no longer need half their workforce judging on linkedin vibes.
But the definition of economically active differs between the two: Finland includes people from ages 15-89, while in Spain you need to be 16 or older. And judging from what I read the rise in unemployment in Finland is attributed to more people entering the workforce.
In my country, this action would be literally illegal.
Even in countries where it isn’t, it feels highly immoral. “I’m not in any kind of pressure to do this but I’m choosing to shed the people who created my wealth for greater personal gain”.