If you're an individual or a small business owner who wants to no longer pay for my services, you should be allowed to stop doing so. If you're a megacorp, however, you wield extremely disproportionate power over thousands of people, and your moves can send shockwaves through an entire industry and have severe consequences for your employees that have no real power in comparison to you. I think that moderating the actions of huge businesses will be far better in these situations, especially if their reasoning for mass layoffs is maximizing profit-wringing rather than actual desperation and an immediate need to cut expenses.

A megacorp employer holds no more power over its employees than a small business.

That is a myopic view not born out by reality.

It’s as truthful a statement as saying the law treats all equally since both the rich and poor are banned from sleeping under bridges.

And yet you completely failed to say what is wrong about it

Just look up any town that had a single large employer and what happened to those towns after that employer left. Small companies do not posses the same ability to impact an entire town of people and everyone who lives in it, even those that didn't work for the employer.

OK, I will grant you this one edge case. As for the other 99% of people, my point stands.

So the have power only when they cease to exist? That's an odd example to use.

They don't have to cease to exist. They can just choose to relocate or close that location because they're big enough to do that. Maybe extorting another town for tax breaks if they relocate there while they're at it.

Absolutely not, if megacorp feels need to lay off half its workforce that is its prerogative. Employment is a business relationship. Businesses have to be flexible to be competitive.

The whole point of a business is to make a profit. If its not making a profit or growing, its at risk of dying, then layoffs hit 100%. The ship has to stay afloat.

There's no fundamental diff between a small business and large business here except scale.

That just is not true, though. A company externalises a lot of its cost on the rest of society; laying off older employees, for example, that likely won’t find another job until retirement, are a liability society has to take care of. The only thing separating Workers with insurance coverage via their employer from eternal financial ruin is their very job.

When the auto companies fucked up in Detroit, they wreaked havoc on an entire town. The tech giants raised rent in the valley so much, it essentially became uninhabitable to anyone but software engineers. There are more examples.

Businesses are just as much part of society as individuals, and they have to do their part of this relationship. IMHO this includes being considerate about layoffs, and taking care of your employees.

A company generates value for society, or it ceases to exist over the long run.

We have unemployment insurance for laid off workers and most people at megacorps also get severence when they get let go. Older employees can find the same jobs at different companies there are almost no jobs that are exclusive to any one company and even where that is the case you can still find related jobs. There is no excuse.

Unemployment levels are near 4% right now, historically near all time lows.

Silicon Valley is expensive because of nimby zoning laws. We do not have that problem in Austin as Texas is pro-growth and allows for dense, high rise buildings and apartments to be built at will. As a result, our rent has gone down significantly in the last several years despite population growth. Fix your regulations and the supply problems in housing will fix themselves.

You're not calculating the cost to society by keeping zombie companies alive that aren't productive.

Could you share your calculations showing that it's better for society to let the old, poor and downtrodden die in the streets?

No, because I'm not the one making the claims, you are. Also your attempt at emotional manipulation doesn't work, it's very transparent.

>If I no longer want to pay for your services, I should be able to stop for any reason, or no reason at all.

Yeah but you live in a society, not a world of 8.1 billion sovereigns.

A properly ordered society allows people to stop paying for services when no longer wanted.

employees aren't services, they're employees.

This libertarian fantasy where you can do as you please, pretending your company is a person and your employees are furniture might be what you think is a "properly ordered society".

But guess what? , most of us don't, and it's a common view across both the left and the right :-). It's same reason most people left and right didn't really care when some guy that denied people their health insurance got denied himself.

If you are talking about the murder of an innocent man, I hope we can both agree that this was an act of pure evil, regardless of what his job was.

If the allegations about the suspect are true it was an act of someone in pain denied access to healthcare.

Like the case of Kirk or Ian Watkins, nobody should be killed but i won't lose sleep.

I consider that a depraved indifference to the murder of innocents.

what were those three innocent of?

It was an act of evil, but it was also utterly predictable.

Man downplays school shootings for years, and then dies in school shooting. It's poetic, really.

His very own opponents warned him of the very thing that would kill him. And he made it his life mission not to listen.

At a fundamental level, I agree with you.

I also believe that the fact 1,000 employees can be laid off at once, and then flood the market with applications, is not something we should prevent. Rather, it's a sign we need to make more small independent companies. This is a concentration problem.

That would of course require that maybe we shouldn't have the Magnificent 7, but the Magnificent 100. Maybe instead of the Fortune 500, we need the Fortune 5000, with each one much smaller. Not happening anytime soon with current incentives, but I think it would be better for everyone. We shouldn't split Google into two, but into thirty.

It would be radical... but imagine if we set an aggressive, aggressive cap on employees and contractors. Like, limit 100, with a 1% corporate income tax on every additional person. Projects at scale - 50 companies cooperating; maybe with some sort of new corporation cooperation legal structure (call it the D-Corp, it manages a collection of C-Corps working together, and cannot collect profits for itself or own property, a nonprofit that manages for-profit companies who voluntarily join in a singular direction).

That wouldn't just be radical, it would be a violation of free market principles. If smaller orgs are actually more effective than big ones, then the market would self-correct. I'm inclined to argue that we have the economic data to prove your theory wrong.

Imposing a hard headcount limit would be the definition of pointless government overreach.

In general this is not true. Typically you sign contracts and make agreements. You can't just unilaterally decide 'nahhh I don't wanna'.

Employment IS NOT like this - employment is at will. But we still have liability, particularly around discrimination.

And, also, you can follow the law and be a piece of shit. It's easy, people do it all the time.