Although for the sake of this discussion I agree with you, I could have a lot of fun making a list entitled, "things companies have done to people that are worse than firing them."
Probably not a good idea to do something illegal in the middle of a lawsuit.
Uber has one and one chance only to get this behind them: to play by the book and to ask 'how high' when the judge tells them to jump. If they try anything funny they can expect the ROI of that to be substantial and negative.
OT, have you noticed an increase in superfluous downvoting? I'm not really complaining, just trying to figure out if I'm imagining it or if it's randomness doing its thing.
Since HN has become so much bigger, I wonder if the mods could scale down the effect of downvoting. E.g. make it take two downvotes to make a comment appear at 0.
It removes scores from your comments and replaces your karma counter with "(9999)".
HN is much more pleasant now.
The location was a factory for a company you have heard of. Temporary employees were 99 and 44/100% of the workforce. One staffing agency, call it Agency A, had the main contract for the site and they were required to give some of the work to their competitors. It was policy to assign temps from other agencies impossible schedules so that they would quit and be replaced by temps from Agency A.
Legend has it that Japanese companies, rather than terminate under-performing employees, will seat them "at the window" and not assign them any tasks at all ... This is not terribly compelling short-term, but is horribly boring .
Also, you probably would have to hide all the work, since depending on your contract your employer would probably have some claim to it, since it was during work hours.
I once worked at a newspaper, when "online" was new and side project of the marketing department so that they could sell more ads.
Until I automated things, we were cutting and pasting a few articles each night from Quark into BBEdit and hand-massaging it into HTML templates for upload. They assigned us an "editor". Poor guy had written pro-civil-rights editorials at a time when that didn't go over well. Got assigned shit jobs for decades to try and force him out. We didn't create new content; there was nothing to edit. But, they made him go to all the meetings and report that each day. Dude used a giant trackball and knew nothing about tech, but somehow landed in the department that would one day rule the newsroom. I wonder how he's doing these days.
What do you think they do with the managers they want to fire? ;)
Hell, even in the entertainment industry, where employment is gig-based, Masashi Tashiro didn't get blackballed until he was convicted twice for voyeurism, twice for drug abuse, once for nearly crippling a guy in a car accident he caused, and once for posessing an illegal weapon [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masashi_Tashiro#Second_trial_f...
The "pointless simple make-work" isn't to build up cause, it's to abuse and degrade them until they have enough of it and quit. The technical term for this is "constructive dismissal".