The term 'layoffs' in this context is simply not what you're describing.
These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.
And, yes, of course layoffs are something that need to be justified, just as with firing an individual employee, as you know -- the "employee is not being productive" is a justification.
>These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.
Isn't that most layoffs? Think of the layoffs post GFC. Did the subprime mortgage crisis suddenly make everyone incompetent, or are companies simply trying to trim budgets and need to hit some number? If it's actually due to poor performance, it would be through a PIP or similar.
Yes but the GP used poor individual performance as their only positive reason of layoffs not needing justification. So the reply was that individual performance is almost never a factor in actual layoffs, a point which you and I agree with. Thus, poor employee performance is not a monolith that can be used to explain all layoffs, and these companies should have to give better reasons that align with actual reality.
It's about the immense asymmetry of power here. Yes, a person can leave just like a company can fire. But a single person quitting is nearly never a massive disruption to the business, but the business firing someone is nearly always a catastrophy for that person.
I don't need to justify quitting because I'm not harming you by doing so. Laying off hundreds of people absolutely requires careful and validated justification as your significantly harming nearly everyone impacted.
Of course these companies do pay well usually, but not all of them do, and not every individual has the privilege of cheap health and rent and a cheap family. Any single significant factor in a persons life can cause that "well paid" factor to mean a lot less, especially if it drags out to 6 months or more like it is known to do
Ya, it's an easy mistake though, very subtle difference between general dismissal/firing/layoff. They're interpreting layoff to mean the same as "firing" or general dismissal, but as far as I understand it's more like a shortage of work thing due to lack of income on the company side, compared to insufficient productivity on the worker's side.
A subtle difference in terminology, but a bit difference in terms of outcome. In a layoff you'll likely have no issues getting severance if it was ever on the table to begin with, employment insurance, it's not a mark against you on a resume necessarily or socially.
This really isn't true. Take Microsoft, for instance - one of their recent layoffs eviscerated the Principal band including a number of high performers. I'm talking people I personally knew who had climbed the ladder rapidly, were directly working with multiple external partners driving tens of millions in revenue (that is, external partner has problem, threatens to pull spend on product, this employee is one of the first pulled in to engage and get it solved), with visibility all the way to the VP level and higher happy with their work and partner teams trying to poach them away - still laid off.
> High performers aren't getting let go, even if they are in department being cut, they will be moved.
Wishful thinking. I just survived (yet another) round of layoffs. They are desperate to bring headcount down. If a whole team is being cut, everyone goes.
It's really a question of how flexible upper management is in the numbers they set out. If there's wiggle room - sure. They will try to find a place in an adjacent team. But if the whole department is getting slashed, there is no adjacent team.
A 20% cut across the entire company isn’t the only form of layoffs. When everyone at a factory is laid off individual performance means absolutely nothing.
Sometimes a company decides a specific market it’s worth it and every single programmer in the company is let go. Sometimes companies decide everything making over X$ in a position isn’t worth keeping etc.
>High performers aren't getting let go, even if they are in department being cut, they will be moved.
Dude, no. This is just wishful thinking.
I've seen critical employees get laid off without any backup plan or even knowledge of what these employees do. When those critical tasks then don't get performed I've seen laid off employees be called and begged to come back because there's no one left who even knows how to perform those critical tasks.
Layoffs rarely make sense. I've been though multiple rounds of:
"Our administration costs are too high, layoff 20% of them."
"Oh wait, admin work is not getting done. We need more admin staff, hire"
"Our administration costs are too high, layoff 20% of them."
With the way our society is set up to tie a large number of benefits necessary to live to employment, then yes you are actually harming someone by ending their employment.
Severance might outweigh that harm, but it depends on the amount, if any is given. Also I want to point out that the vast majority of companies give 0 severance. I’ve gotten it once in my life and I’m fairly certain it was “shut the fuck up” money as they had done some shady shenanigans to a bonus I was entitled to.
Ah yes, I forgot that surviving treatable diseases is a luxurious first world lifestyle.
If you don’t believe that US regulations and law are set up in a way that pressures people to maintain employment at a company, then you have your head in the sand
> These layoffs occur at such scale that it's unreasonable to assume any individual employee being "let go" has even been evaluated as an individual.
There’s no reason to think that you need to evaluate individuals to have a reason to let them go. I might be the best iOS developer in the world but if I’m working for a company that doesn’t need a custom iOS app, they should lay me off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And, yes, of course layoffs are something that need to be justified, just as with firing an individual employee, as you know -- the "employee is not being productive" is a justification.