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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

This is only possible because of the extreme anti-worker legal situation in the US. In many many (most?) countries doing this is illegal and will land you a court decision against your breach of the employee's rights (in addition to you owing that employee severance + lack-of-advanced-notice fine, by law and before any legal procedure).

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Because these employees are in California, Google is required to give 60 days notice of termination. Typically in big tech layoffs this is done as paid garden leave.

> In many many (most?) countries doing this is illegal and will land you a court decision against your breach of the employee's rights

What rights do you mean other than the notice period (and the ones surrounding whether the contract can be terminated at all)?

Because notice period can be solved by continuing to pay the salary and to be fair, Google and the other tech giants have usually done that to a pretty high level during layoffs. E.g. Discord is now paying out 5 months of salaries to the laid off people.

(I find the escorting out of building, etc. super weird.)

Technically they're still "employed" a bit longer but prevented from going into offices or doing anything else in their final 2 weeks or whatever it is. And they get severance after.

This is just so hilariously wrong.

Given apparent US gun violence, immediate escorting off the premises seems wise. Why let potentially angry ex-employees linger?

The question is actually: Why let our employers being able to treat us like a disposable tissue?

I get to treat the employer like a disposable tissue too. They aren't forced to employ me, but I'm not forced to work for them.

Most people who need to work for health insurance, shelter, food, etc have to treat their employers as if they're golden tissues. If they tear them, their life turns upside down, often for the worst.

Because they are human beings with rights.

Even the most deranged employees likely won’t have weapons on them. Most of the workplace violence seems to happen when a disgruntled (ex)employee returns to their place of work some time after the fact.

The real "weapons" they've got are unchecked access to production systems.

Treat people systematically in inhuman ways, sooner or later one of them will crack in unpredictable ways.

Ah, the pernicious paranoia behind the security state. Why trust anyone when they can do bad things, especially to assets?

gun violence in the workplace tends to be from people coming back after with vengeance, not bringing guns to work every day just in case.

immediately escorting somebody off the premises seems more likely to trigger such gun violence than avoid it.

in any case, gun violence remains a very unlikely event wrt to the headlines it receives (divide the statistics by "out of 335 million people")

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