Sacking of LJ staff with immediate effect & without severance pay -- legal in USA?
I've read a couple of links on my f-list to the news that LJ sacked 12 of its 28 US employees without warning this week.
( Thoughts about this )
( Thoughts about this )
Well, in fact this is one of the things about it that I find interesting.
Unions are much less powerful here than they were back in the 1970s. (What follows is my own interpretation of events, of course: I realise others might have a different POV.)
It seems to me that the unions did so much damage over here in the 1970s by abusing their power that back in 1979 the electorate was pissed off enough to elect a government (headed by Margaret Thatcher) that promised to curb them. Over a period of years the Conservatives introduced laws that restricted the ability of the unions to disrupt the entire country at will, and so the balance of political power (and I'm including the unions as part of the balancing exercise) was permanently altered.
When a Labour government was finally elected in 1989 they didn't make significant changes to those laws, because--regardless of all the spouting about idealogy--they recognised that the new laws had introduced changes that were necessary for the proper functioning of the economy.
So how does it come to be that, even though our unions are now less powerful than they used to be, we still have employment laws that protect the individual against the more powerful employer? Well, I believe that societal attitudes change over time, as people grow familiar with the concepts that lie behind socially responsible legislation. For instance, we (in the UK) didn't have any legislation to outlaw sex or race discrimination until (respectively) 1977/1979, and I'm sure that when it was first introduced many people thought it was bananas. 30 years down the line, though, I'm sure that most people over here would agree that it's fair and necessary to protect their fellow citizens against those sorts of discrimination, and so even employers have come to accept that the narrowing of their options re: hiring, firing and the day-to-day treatment of employees is a necessary price to pay for living in a developed society.
I believe it's the same re: our other employment protection legislation, and also the legislation that ensures that we all have access to health care and, when necessary, benefits. Obviously our provisions aren't anything like perfect, but I do believe that there's now a general societal recognition of the need to protect the vulnerable in relation to those things, even if it means that a minority is able to take cynical advantage of the protection in place.
For that reason I'm pretty sure that, if an American government would just take the first steps, then over time attitudes within the community of American electors would change. Clearly that can't happen, though, until there's a large enough body of people ready to elect the people who'd be willing to effect the changes.
And I would seriously CRY when LJ and all my friends there would be GONE all of a sudden.
It really is a most horrible prospect :(
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