As Meta shows, a layoff by any other name still smells as cruel
Way back there when utility companies were still named after inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison (no one took credit for inventing public sewers), the Potomac Edison Power Co. laid off a bunch of workers — except in the news release didn’t say they were being laid off, it said they were being rewarded with “an enhanced separation package.”
When the paper called them “layoffs” anyway, the company called the next morning to complain.
A sub-footnote of capitalism is that we are expected to show more sensitivity to the feelings of the company than to the workers who are on the wrong end of a pink slip.
Even the word “layoff” itself is a euphemism for “firing,” and corporate PR offices went to great lengths to explain the nonexistent difference.
Companies that fired people were cruel, soulless animals. Companies that laid people off were perceived to be victims themselves of some outside influence, like a poor economy, that forced their hand.
And I’m glad to report that the new, post-covid economy has caused corporate America to up its termination game, going to places that enhanced separation packages never dreamed of.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced mass firings last month, but framed it as doing a favor to the workforce, which “wanted more transparency sooner into any restructuring plans,” freeing them of accumulated “uncertainty and stress.”
So congratulations to Facebook for being humane enough to put these people out of the misery of collecting a paycheck. He isn’t Mark Zuckerberg firing his employees, he’s John Wayne shooting an injured horse. Now you don’t have to worry about it any more, Poindexter, see you in the next life. You’re welcome.
Of course you expect Facebook executives, who seem to have all the humanity of seaweed, to act like this. But they are not alone. Some of the 12,000 employees at Google who were fired learned of their misfortune when their login credentials no longer worked. They had been notified of their firings by email, but apparently it’s hard to read your email if you’ve been locked out of the system.
Then along comes McDonald’s, land of golden arches and smiling clowns and — it went about as well as you might expect. According to The New York Times, McDonald’s instructed its administrative employees to work remotely so it could fire them virtually. “Remote” and “virtual” as employment concepts didn’t even exist in the days of Potomac Edison, so maybe this is progress.
But it seemed cowardly on the part of the company, which demonstrated a Soviet-like erasure of history and a denial that the worker ever existed. Let people go remotely and you don’t even have to break out of the happy little tune you hum to the world. Two all beef patties, special sauce, you’re fired, lettuce, cheese, pickles, we’ll mail you the photos of the kids you kept on your desk, onions on a sesame seed bun.
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“If we had this conversation three years ago, I would have said this is cruel and unusual punishment,” Bob Sutton, a professor at Stanford, told the Times. “But it’s changed so dramatically since the pandemic that I’m confused.”
Except, unless you're firing someone for pouring laxative into the coffee urn, there’s no real humane way to do it, is there? In some ways it’s worse to have to stifle sobs while cleaning out your desk in front of your co-workers and then — and this was something they must have started teaching in business-management classes c. 2005 — having an administrator escort you out of the office, because you might be so distraught that you would make a homemade bomb out of Windex and parts salvaged from an old fax machine.
As long as we live in a system where mass firings are rewarded with a hefty bump in stock prices, I guess it will be ever thus. It’s the corporate equivalent of losing weight by eating Twinkies.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Meta, McDonald's find new ways to make layoffs even more taxing
