If you plan to run a business I hope you take it seriously enough to not fire anyone that hurts your feelings.

> hurts your feelings

Let's not trivialize verbal abuse by calling it hurt feelings.

In the article they point out she said it once and it wasn't part of a pattern.

Let's not trivialize upending someone's entire life because they hurt your feelings.

"Let's not trivialize firing someone because they (verbally) abused someone"? Are you OK with mobbing in the workplace? They may be "just words" but the can actually have a huge mental negative effect on someone, especially if sustained.

I'm not saying this level of seriousness is what happened here, but you exaggerate in the other direction.

As with all forms of verbal abuse, the presence of a power imbalance is paramount. And since we abolished slavery, it is about as high as it gets here.

What an employee says about their boss generally has zero implications on their career and lives, so long as it does not outright accuse them of a crime. When's the last time someone called you to provide a reference on your boss? I thought so.

In turn, what a boss says about their employees can be entirely career-ending and therefore life-altering, even if said in jest or later retracted. A higher standard exists precisely because the stakes are so much higher.

We shouldn't tolerate verbal abuse to avoid upending the life of the abuser.

Yes, adopt the language of therapists to add some gravitas. Sorry, but getting called an asshole/dickhead/whatever (especially if it's true) is not abuse in this context. Even less so given the power imbalance between the employee and the employer.

In a strange plot twist, calling trivial things “abuse” is what actually trivializes abuse.

I'd say that making such determinations based on fragmentary information, such as decontextualised headlines, is a better characterisation. Arguments like these (where some people say "it's abuse!" and others say "it's not abuse!", and nobody focuses on how they're not using the same "it") make the lines seem blurred when actually, it's pretty clear-cut most of the time.

Even if you know the lines aren't blurred, if you perceive others acting as though it's up for debate, you're more likely to consider bad-faith appeals to the subjectivity of abuse as perhaps being in good faith. Few among us are philosophers capable of reasoning everything through from first principles, all the time, so these things matter.

Sure, I agree with all that, well-said. “Dickhead, asshole, douchebag, fuckstain” are terms of endearment in some of my social circles. Context matters.

Tone and body language are like 80%+ of in-person, verbal communication.

We need to be very careful to, as I mentioned, not “abuse” the term abuse to the point where it becomes meaningless. If everything is abuse, nothing is abuse, and we need to invent a new term.

Someone calling names is pretty trivial though, literally the behavior of schoolyard children, and it certainly should take more than that to rattle an adult.

Calling others names shows a total lack of self-control and disrespect towards others. It's toxic in personal relationships too. If my boss called me names I would rm -rf my hard drive and walk out immediately. I have too much self respect to deal with that.

Frankly, if you can't give and take the piss, you wouldn't last five minutes in a British workplace.

We don't take ourselves too seriously, and find people who do take themselves seriously worthy of some extra piss taking to bring them down a peg.

(Oh, and rm -rf'ing your HD *would* land you in very serious legal trouble. It is a criminal act under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. And rightly so.)

We actually have free speech in the US but we don't allow people to freely abuse us and will walk.

Same thing in Blighty old boy.

> Calling others names shows a total lack of self-control and disrespect towards others.

As does some of the conduct that may lead to the counterparty calling you names in the heat of the moment.

Blame the victim territory. Control your emotions and good things will follow.

That's the case for both sides of this equation.

You'll see plenty of it here on HN - some commenters are great at just staying within the guidelines while pushing others over the edge in frustration.

Does the UK have above average just-shy-of-two-years turnover? Seems there might be a small incentive to let people go before that threshold.

Not from what I've seen - that small incentive is usually outweighed by the immense burden of retraining and finding a good candidate.

It's similar to probationary periods - you'll see a few people fired right at the three month mark but it's usually more of a case of giving that employee grace for the probationary period rather than accelerating a firing that'd happen later.

I've definitely known places to find ways to get rid of staff before 2 years are up but they tend to be hospitality jobs.

I believe the accrual is in practice gradual. E.g. 103 weeks in, the tribunal would basically give you the same rights as full 2 years in. 1.5 year in, they will give you some of them, etc.

No, several of these are hard cut-offs. So, 103 weeks isn't two years, you can't be unfairly dismissed under the terms of this law. In this case I believe the relevant paragraph of legislation is:

"Section 94 does not apply to the dismissal of an employee unless he has been continuously employed for a period of not less than two years ending with the effective date of termination"

Section 94 is the name of a section of the current law regarding the general idea of like, employing people, and that section says you can't unfairly dismiss them, so this sub-sub clause says that only applies after two years.

Edited to add: This stuff is easier to find in the UK because although it's legalese, the Westminster Parliament is obliged by its own rules to name laws after what they do, this is an employment law so I searched for "Employment". In the US it might be called the NICEHAT Act or Jim Smith's Law or some other useless nonsense because they have no such rule.

This is the letter of the law. But I have been advised in the past that in practice, if reviewing a case, the tribunal is likely to see the accrual as gradual. So if you fire someone a week before their two years are up, they may well decide it was unfair.

At the very bottom yeah. There's some level of abuse of employment rules and such for low paid work, particularly at larger outfits. Sometimes it's outright criminal and these people are least able to advocate for their own rights.

Persuading the tax man that the cleaners who in effect are your direct employees are "freelance" somehow and so you shouldn't have to pay the tax. Or claiming that the labourers you hired don't get paid from 0830 because they aren't "really" working until 0900 even though they're in a company minibus being driven to the worksite and this is the only way they could get there.

Neither of those things is legal here but both of them might happen and will only sometimes get reported and those responsible will get at worst a fine. If you tried anything like this shit with Sam who has a penthouse office in the City he'll summon a swarm of employment lawyers and ruin your life, but because Mateusz who cleans the toilets has dubious immigration status and he's behind on his rent he's probably not going to make a fuss when you steal from him this way. This sucks.

The problems are always at the very bottom. People who are closest to the poverty line, most easily replaceable, least easily able to organize and demand better and also most separated from those who have more freedom to demand change. One important angle unions think about is schemes to separate these low wages workers from colleagues who would be able to advocate for improvements. If the guy cleaning the toilets doesn't legally work for the same company as the guy who uses them, suddenly the question of whether "cleaning toilets" pays a living wage isn't a matter of employee solidarity...

Edited: Swapped Manhattan for the City (of London) because the topic is specifically UK employment

In America we like to fire anyone right before they get a chance to collect on any retirement benefits.

I have never worked at a job that had those kind of benefits.

They never existed if nobody ever gets to collect on them.

You still can if you can show you were unfairly discriminated against, for example in racial, ethnic, religious or gender basis. In case of pregnant women, this is so strong that in fact the employer may need to prove they are not discriminating.