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Comment by boolcow | Hacker News Reader

What severance is being offered to the employees being laid off? Is it up to the high ethical standard set by Airbnb?

Separated [Airbnb] employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the rest of the world.

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I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with equating ethical with generous. Basically it turns ethics into money, with the idea you can buy ethicalness.

If you’re cutting off someone’s source of income, giving them extra money gives them extra time to land on their feet. I’d say that’s pretty ethical.

Is shorter or zero severance unethical? We all enter into this employment contract knowing it could end abruptly from either party. If money is tight, they could afford longer severances for all if they cut 4000 instead. Does that not seem unethical toward the extra 1000 cut?

Regardless of legality and what the parties agreed to contractually, the fact remains that abrupt termination with zero severance is harmful for the former employee, especially in this economic climate. If the corporation pays a generous severance, the harm is reduced or eliminated. On a scale of ethicality, the more harmful an action is, the less ethical it is, so yes, paying severance is more ethical than not paying severance.

I find the terms "less and more" applied to ethical confusing. Telling a company to harm people a little instead of a lot is enabling.

My use of ethical here is strongly tied to obligation. e.g., it is kind to give money to a person, but not unethical if you chose not to especially if you can't afford to.

The way I understand you is that it's kinder/more sympathetic to provide a greater severance. This part I agree with!

Severance is not free, though. Increasing it will either cost Uber more heads or greater risk (and more heads later). I'm repeating this question: Is this not unethical to the retained employees?

Yeah, not sure why you would equate those two.

Providing a former spouse with alimony money is not generosity. Neither is providing a former employee with severance money generosity. In both cases, the ethics are incredibly obvious.

The fact that alimony is required and severance is not is simply a matter of a corrupt (US) political system. This system leaves it to individual CEOs to act ethically (or not) and the public to judge them.

We can improve the ethics of tech companies by holding them to account for how they behave. One way to do that is judging their behavior during layoffs.

A lot of companies don't have a public image because nobody knows or cares what they do. So they have nothing to fear from a few bad glassdoor reviews.

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