A business relationship like employment is by mutual consent. Either party can opt out at any time.
I'm not sure this is something that needs fixing. You seem to feel differently. What am I missing?
It's really only the US that allows employers to unilaterally terminate their employees, and there's ample evidence that companies use it as plausible cover for all sorts of actions that would be illegal (discrimination against protected groups). That, in my book, is indeed something that needs fixing.
But even beyond plausible discrimination: mutual consent is least ambiguous when there's mutual and equal power. No such balance exists in the employer-employed relationship: employees are de facto dependent on their employers for their ability to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.
What if I want to quit?
If I can't be fired, then the complement to that would be I cannot quit.
There needs to be a balance where I can quit the company and the company can quit me but where companies don't abuse the system (ex Amazon in this example). I don't think there is a great solution, other than a command economy (but there you are not quite free to change "companies" either).
Is there supposed to be a catch here? If you want to quit, then you should be allowed to quit.
To make it explicit: in the vast majority of the developed world, the individual employee's autonomy is given priority. Companies still have broad discretion when it comes to firing; they're simply held to a higher standard of justification than "we don't like you anymore."
This compromise does make sense in a slightly unchanging economy.
Also, if you have highly sought skills this is a detriment, if you have skills that are not in demand, then this is nice to have.
You can also always negotiate an earlier release. These periods offer stability for both parties.
How does this work elsewhere in the world? From a legal point of view at-will employment seems like the default when it comes to buying a service (ie. labor). If you rent a server from amazon you can stop the rental anytime you want, and they can kick you off anytime you want.
I think this gets to the heart of the difference: Americans tend to think of their employment as a continuous exchange of dollars for their labor, whereas most of the world takes the concept of an employment contract to heart.
That contract, in turn, contains both legal and contractual stipulations that prevent firing without cause: employers must give you so-and-so many weeks of notice before beginning the process of firing you, must pay you for so-and-so many months if you present an argument to a labor board, &c. There's nothing informal about it: it's the difference between continuous billing for a service and a fixed-length contract.
Here's a random PDF I found that explains some of the difference between US and French labor contracts[1].
[1]: https://www.bakermckenzie.com/-/media/files/insight/publicat...
A virtualized server from Amazon does not need food, clothing, and shelter to survive. It does not have a family to support. Simply, it is not alive. and laws around humans and commodities should probably be very different.
More cold-hearted practical arguments for businesses: the virtual machine cannot vote in the next election, it cannot contact the local news media to complain about working conditions, it cannot unionize. If things get very bad it cannot buy torches and pitchforks.
Your boss does.
The low hanging fruit analogies are slavery, limited suffrage, and laws against homosexual civil unions, all of which were global norms at one point.
The positive argument is that it's already a fixture and an agreed-upon solution in most of the developed world. The normative argument, i.e. that it's good, is in the next two paragraphs.
This is false. This presumes that all employees are incapable of saving money or seeking alternate employment quickly.
Neither is true.
It doesn't presume anything of the sort: you don't need to make a statement about "all" employees to observe that the average American under 35 has under $10,000 in liquid savings[1]. That can disappear pretty quickly with a car or home accident, unexpected injury, or legal liability. Even outside of those, it's not very much to live on outside of LCoL areas for more than a couple of months.
The average American is also not a tech worker: they're somewhere in the lower middle class, and may or may not have the ability to transition rapidly between jobs (our current funhouse-mirror economy aside). You're making extraordinary presumptions about millions of people, presumptions with very real and material consequences.
But to go even further: we should not be punishing people with the threat of hunger or exposure for failing to keep liquid savings! The current economy doesn't encourage liquid (i.e., conservative) saving techniques, and American education does not consistently include financial planning. The vast majority of Americans are blamelessly "winging it" and should not be punished for that.
To tie a bow around it: I don't need to make a universal statement about every employee in America to correctly observe that many employees are materially threatened by at-will employment. Attempting to promote this into universal claims is bewildering at best; it's immediately obvious to everyone that plenty of people can survive an unexpected firing.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-ame...
The fact that some (tech/highly skilled) workers have actual leverage doesn't negate the fact that many, MANY others don't have any.
We can't operate on how things ought to be, we have to look at how things are actually...and they're bad.
The privates were all paid the same, every two weeks.
Half were able to pay their bills and did well. The other half would spend their paychecks as fast as possible, and would run out of money after 1 week. The 2nd week was spent begging, borrowing, and in general being a deadbeat.
My dad would sit down with them, go over their spending, and prepare budgets for them. Literally none of them were able to adhere to those budgets.
Again, 50%.
In civilization, we make affordances for people that go against the razors edge of pure efficiency.
There are tons of places hiring right now; Amazon isn't the only game in town for labor.
I realize it’s easy to forget you’re discussing human beings when computers make much more sense. I don’t know, call me crazy, European, idealistic, whatever, but putting a human in the loop to say “eh, that’s a bad call” isn’t a lot to ask nor the demise of capitalism. If a human being double checking and delivering bad news is the only thing holding the economy back from grand designs of glorious, automated scale, I’d prefer another economy that pays more attention to its purpose - which is the sustenance of humans, not the concentration of wealth based on flagrant disregard for the welfare of people it serves.
I like the way Sorkin put it: “we used to wage war on poverty, not poor people,” and I think your initial question about empathy illuminates much of that sentiment.
This strikes me as ad hominem; I'm talking about standard unskilled workers. Anyone who doesn't have enough savings on hand to buy food and shelter for the short period of time while switching jobs in one of the best labor markets for workers that our generation has ever seen is simply irresponsible.
There are so many unfilled jobs right now.
> I realize it’s easy to forget you’re discussing human beings when computers make much more sense
Oh, come on. We're talking about consent to a business transaction between human beings here, obviously. Please do try to comment in good faith.
Luckily for us, I’m not debating you and need not concern myself with whatever you’d like to call the argument. I’m simply appealing to whatever sliver of empathy you have to consider that just maybe firing someone with a batch job is a good place to think about an ethical line. I didn’t even advocate to draw one, just introduced nuance to think about as a counterweight to your extraordinarily simplistic view of labor and its role in society.
If you can’t meet me even there and instead take an opportunity to call people who just might starve to death on the other end of such an experience “irresponsible,” based on ostensibly a distant understanding of finance and employment for lower social classes, we are not going to agree on anything. The ad hominem would be noting that from your views it reads like you have next to no experience with the financial circumstances you’re discussing, which given the topic seems an interesting but unnecessarily personal observation.
If these comments are in bad faith in this forum then I have absolutely no interest in baptizing my views.
Honestly, I’d be curious how your interview at Dominos would go. I’m not being snide. You should take a break from this line of work and go after the so many unfilled jobs you’re talking about for a while, because I think it would refine your viewpoint on this (speaking from personal experience). You know how one can interview for a cybersec gig and disclose that they were fired once for some bullshit and everyone shares a good laugh about the story while cutting an offer letter? That doesn’t happen at Dominos.
Some views here are very ‘boolean’ and lack nuance... presented as simplifying complex matters. But it’s rather a simplistic mode of thinking, which reduces our lives to lives devoid of empathy. This mode of thinking also tends to see ‘working class’ folks who can’t manage their finances as folks who simply lack character.
In the words of Rutger Bregman... poverty isn’t a lack of character, it’s a lack of cash (recommended read: his book ‘Utopia for Realists’)
And don’t forget, what this pandemic has showed us is that lots of working class folks really are essential workers.
Yes, there are some folks who are lazy, but you find that in all sectors.
Letting simple algorithms designed by folks with a very ‘boolean’ worldview determine who is worthy of employment (survival) and who is not leads us to world as illustrated in the movie Elysium.
I for one appreciate your view.
Please continue baptizing ;)
Feels like this sums up so much of our world, it's scary. Anyway.
Main issue is with "mutual consent", or more specifically, negotiating power.
A contract negotiated between two parties with similar amounts of power will have terms that protect both sides. These will often define things like advance notice for cancellation, or penalties for early cancellation. The paying party usually wants the most flexibility for cancellation, the counterparty wants certainty of revenue, so a balance is found. Assuming everyone did their work, both sides should be reasonably happy with the terms of the contract.
A negotiation between a large corporation and an individual (low-level) employee is not really a negotiation, the individual employee can only accept or reject the corporation's offer but they cannot typically negotiate specific parts of the contract. Individually, they have no leverage. If they decline the offer and move on to the next company, they don't have any more negotiating power over there either.
Let's also talk about BATNA a bit here. BATNA for a company: they just hire the next person that comes along, still with the terms dictated by the company. BATNA for an employee: accept an offer somewhere else (again with the terms dictated by the company), or starve.
So what can an individual employee do to get more leverage and get an outcome closer to a "mutual consent" contract? Well, the obvious option is to coordinate their negotiation with others who also have low individual negotiating power but share similar interests. Combined, they should have a lot more leverage.
We could call this negotiating process "collective bargaining", and the group of individuals a "union".
Of course if that was correct we likely would not have seen the rise of unions in the first place because things would simply have adjusted over the many decades if industrial revolution leading up to wide scale establishment of labor unions. When it comes down to being able to survive, people will accept the terms they're given. They don't have the luxury of waiting for a "market correction" on labor rates and benefits.
Open markets can find efficient solutions to complex problems. Unfortunately, much like waiting for evolution to find a solution for a problem, it doesn't always happen at a time scale suitable for human lifetimes.
A tremendous amount of retail just died in the 2000s, with only a few survivors. Either folding, or being bought out and merging with other companies that folded.
Amazon accelerated what you describe in every quantifiable way and it was undoubtedly baked into the overall strategy. Yes, the situation was already terminal thanks to the Internet and poor online shopping execution by the incumbents, including Walmart, but overlooking Amazon’s involvement (going so far as to call it not their fault) and pointing at Walmart as the disease itself is a tiny bit of revisionism.
Am I the only one old enough to remember discussions in older forums like these about how brilliant Bezos was to identify and exploit such a now-obvious opportunity? It was obvious then to the point of being damned near Amazon’s entire thesis.
Amazon certainly didn't help their bottom line, but it wasn't the nail in the coffin either.
I’m not sure at this point, both are horrible corporations I’ve resisted as long as I can can, yet both regularly siphon money from my checking account.
Because people arrange their lives around their work situation and it can be significantly damaging to them to lose their jobs due to a bad manager or, as in this post's example, a flawed algorithm.
It takes awhile for a new job to cut that first check. In America, usually around a month.
That month can be insanely scary with no money and mouths to feed.
And the CEOs or their lobbyists go to state and federal capitols to lobby for destruction of these programs, or "donate" to politicians' election campaigns with "wink wink, you know what we want."...
For the poor, losing a job arbitrarily, with no protections, even cultural, can be massively life disrupting.
If you have a policy you require of your employees("You must take a picture of yourself"), and you terminate the employee for not doing it, that is not a without-cause termination. That is a termination for-cause - the cause being the violation of the policy.
Termination without cause would basically be "we are downsizing, you are no longer needed".
The rules about "without-cause" are pretty consistent state to state. However, the rules on "with cause" vary state to state. In a lot of states, you can't terminate someone for violating a policy if they didn't violate it. These policies are a form of "implied contract".
In other states, the employer can act completely and totally arbitrarily, as long as it is not acting illegally.
This is actually the minority of states.
As are my customers.
It's a person's responsibility to plan for job loss.
Contract law requires good faith execution of the contract. It is not good faith to terminate contracts using a known bad system.
For starters, the unequal status of corporations and their employees?
This is a childish fantasy.
On what basis? Aren't they contractors? Do contractors get protections against arbitrary "firings"?
Plus cancellation terms are likely codified in terms of the license agreement.
Note that getting a computer to do something doesn't make it unbiased. People can, and often do, write bias into programs.
Question is, according to whom. For example, Uber got hit with a pretty big fine in Italy because in the view of the court, the people working for Uber should be viewed as employees.
But I know nothing about pre-Uber Italian taxi regulations.