I don’t know if "fired" means something different in Britain, but the article says they were let go or laid off.
OTOH, you could say that a division was “fired” or “laid off” and they’re almost interchangeable. “Fired” might carry the connotation that the specific division was underperforming while “laid off” could mean that it was due to some outside factor (e.g., half of R&D was laid off because manufacturing costs shot up)
Those R&D folks who got laid off are going to go home and complain about getting fired. It doesn't imply it's their fault - it implies that they're angry about it.
Being laid off is also for cause, specifically the cause of "the executives need to juice the stock price".
For example, if you terminate an employee for coming to work late over and over, then the employee was clearly not meeting their expectations and they get terminated due to their own actions, hence they are not eligible for unemployment benefits. Because the state does not have to pay unemployment benefits, the state does not increase the amount of unemployment insurance premiums the employer has to pay.
If you terminate someone to improve cash flow, then the employee is not considered to be terminated due to the employee’s actions, and hence they would be eligible for unemployment benefits. Hence the employer’s unemployment insurance premium probably will go up.
Most people wouldn't say "Greg was laid off for pissing in the water cooler"
More generally, fired is used for anything specific to the individual, whether for cause (they were incompetent) or other reasons (the boss didn't like them). Laid off is for a departure due to company reasons (lack of demand for their product).
If you fire a 500 person team and intend to replace them with new people who do the same thing, it's not really a lay-off, but for legal purposes they probably have to treat it as a lay-off in terms of severance / unemployment compensation because I doubt they can document an actual cause for most of them.
I think its even more whimsical to expect the government to step in and force your employer to continue employing you if they dont want to.
Or should you be able to go to court and sue for breach of contract?
As we see in this thread, many Americans believe that it's actually a good idea. But if you go look at the actual behaviour at the top and bottom you see that as with many of these things the supposedly "bad" benefits labour movements in Europe fought to get for their workers are just like the things "good" senior management have agreed for themselves (but deny to their workers) in the US.
I think this may at least partially explain the attitude of americans. Less of an us vs them mentality cause many lowly workers ARE senior management of their own gig.
Employment contracts in the US can be at-will, which means either party can walk away at any point for no reason.
Sounds awful, until you look at US salaries and average wealth levels. Turns out that easy firing = easy hiring = more demand for workers = easier to be an entrepreneur = even more hiring = more market power for workers.
If you look at places with easy firing, I think you’ll find they are growing extremely rapidly. Vietnam and China used to be the poster children for kids making sneakers and look at them grow today.
I was an economic powerhouse long before then.
The 1930's US stock market crash brought down the entire world!
As another point, it's not possible to make a ton of money selling weapons if you don't already have a thriving manufacturing sector. You have to at least be doing well to begin with.
According to [0], the US reached parity with the UK (probably the richest country in Europe at the time?) in terms of GDP per capita in 1880!
[0] https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/relea...
The situation can vary by province, but hiring/firing employees in Canada immediately exposes businesses to significant government-imposed overhead (both administrative and financial) and risk.
Maybe this is somewhat tolerable for larger organizations with dedicated HR and accounting teams, but dealing with all of the unnecessary and pointless government-imposed overhead and risk definitely harms the productivity of smaller organizations. This is especially true for small businesses that may consist of just one entrepreneur, who's also possibly facing tight margins, who'd just like some additional help.
I know of a number of small business operators throughout the country who would love to hire a first employee, or additional employees, but can't justify it due to the overhead and risk that is unnecessarily imposed by government.
I also know of businesses who had hired employees, but eventually had to let them go because the overhead and risk couldn't be justified any longer. Frequent and substantial minimum wage increases can really cause problems, for example, especially when margins are tight to begin with.
Many jobs in Canada are definitely being lost, or not created in the first place, all thanks to government-imposed overhead and risk that supposedly makes workers better off.
I will almost certainly never hire in Canada. The next company I start will be in Delaware.
More tax and regulation is a moat for larger organizations who can afford to deal with it.
If that business signed a contract for materials and turns out halfway through they don't like the materials, they can't just stop paying and fire the supplier. They have to deal with it as part of their business and move forward in the responsible and legal way.
Treating labor similarly isn't shocking and the social benefits of folks having job security are hard to overstate. For example, all the places with these kinds of labor controls seem to have A LOT less homeless.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-ruthlessly-f...
The above is in the case of redundancies, being ‘fired’ for cause has a different set of criteria and protections, but the onus is on the employer to prove beyond reasonable doubt what you are being fired for
In the US it seems like you can let people go for at moments notice with little process - in the UK that looks like what we would call “being fired” generally for cause.
“In United States labor law, at-will employment is an employer's ability to dismiss an employee for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning, as long as the reason is not illegal (e.g. firing because of the employee's gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or disability status). When an employee is acknowledged as being hired "at will", courts deny the employee any claim for loss resulting from the dismissal. The rule is justified by its proponents on the basis that an employee may be similarly entitled to leave their job without reason or warning. The practice is seen as unjust by those who view the employment relationship as characterized by inequality of bargaining power.
[…]
The doctrine of at-will employment can be overridden by an express contract or civil service statutes (in the case of government employees). As many as 34% of all U.S. employees apparently enjoy the protection of some kind of "just cause" or objectively reasonable requirement for termination that takes them out of the pure "at-will" category, including the 7.5% of unionized private-sector workers, the 0.8% of nonunion private-sector workers protected by union contracts, the 15% of nonunion private-sector workers with individual express contracts that override the at-will doctrine, and the 16% of the total workforce who enjoy civil service protections as public-sector employees.”
The "oh you weren't fired, you were laid off" line is manufactured by HR and is meaningless. If you come in to work one day and your boss decides they don't like the color of your shirt and shows you the door, were you fired or "laid off"?
zorg_fire_one_million_meme.gif
Laid Off = You were let go for things outside your control (company downsizing, etc)
Reminds me of Bill Lumbergh in office space, "so if you could just go ahead and [thing Peter Gibbons really didn't want to do]".
Laid off means the role won’t be backfilled. It could also mean the role was renamed, and they wanted to let the employee go but it looks better for everyone to say it was a layoff.
Let go (at least to me) could mean either.
Just because they were fired for cause doesn't mean the company wants to keep that job around afterwards.
That said, it is unusual not to say 'laid off' these days unless the person was fired for cause, but the recently media frenzy around the term might have them saying other things instead.