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.
