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Was firing an over-reaction?Was firing an over-reaction?Posted Mar 22, 2013 16:44 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)In reply to: Was firing an over-reaction? by drag Parent article: Blum: Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost
In what universe is being fired for exercising your freedom of speech a good thing?
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freedom Posted Mar 22, 2013 18:56 UTC (Fri) by michich (subscriber, #17902) [Link]
I understand why you may feel it is a bad thing, but please let's try to rethink the general issue more thoroughly. First I would like to say something about two phrases that you used in your comment:
"freedom of speech" - How do you understand the phrase? Does it mean the freedom to say whatever you want to whomever you want and never have to carry any possible consequences? In my view that would be a too wide definition. There is no way to prevent the people who hear me talking from making their own opinions and expectations about myself and consequently adjusting the way they act towards me. Freedom of speech means that I can say what I want to whomever I want and never have to fear the application of organized violence (i.e. the power of the state) for it.
"being fired" - Always both the employer and the employee are acting human beings. They associate because they both expect to gain from their mutual cooperation. They both value what they get more highly than what they give. If at any later time one of them no longer believes so, this voluntary cooperation ends. What right does anybody have to force him to associate with the other person any further?
My conclusion is that although the existence of the possibility of "being fired for exercising your freedom of speech" intuitively sounds bad at first, it is actually necessary for freedom. The alternative "being forced (by violence or threat of it) to associate with people against one's will" is truly bad.
freedom Posted Mar 22, 2013 20:07 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
Employers have a social responsibility. Firing someone has the potential to ruin that person's life, it should therefore only be possible in a limited set of cases. This is why many countries have employment protection laws. Expressing an unfavourable opinion about another company isn't one of those cases as long as you don't make stuff up.
> Freedom of speech means that I can say what I want to whomever I want and never have to fear the application of organized violence (i.e. the power of the state) for it.
freedom Posted Mar 23, 2013 5:12 UTC (Sat) by ghane (subscriber, #1805) [Link]
> Employers have a social responsibility. Firing someone has the potential to ruin that person's life, it should therefore only be possible in a limited set of cases.
What about:
Employees have a social responsibility, too. Leaving a job has the potential to ruin a company, it should therefore only be possible in a limited set of cases.
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freedom Posted Mar 23, 2013 5:35 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> Leaving a job has the potential to ruin a company
If that is the case, you're not running the company right.
freedom Posted Mar 23, 2013 11:27 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Sure, and you'll find most places which don't have "at will" likewise do not permit employees to just arbitrarily down tools and walk away from the job without consequences.
Our systems administrators had to give 90 days notice when they more or less simultaneously quit. That was enough time to identify any important work that hadn't been documented, start hiring replacements, figure out what our plans were for the interim and so on.
But if your business will collapse without just one person you're in trouble anyway due to Bus Factor. That one person might be kidnapped, have a mental breakdown or indeed get hit by an actual bus.
freedom Posted Mar 23, 2013 13:57 UTC (Sat) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]
> Firing someone has the potential to ruin that person's life, it should therefore only be possible in a limited set of cases.
If firing can ruin person's life, this is a big problem with society. Laws against management abuses are noneffective when the employees feel that they must work or face a possibility of ruined life. Consider if a social protection would be enough so prospects of finding new work are very OK, then the problem of bad managers would solves itself without any laws. People will simply leave.
freedom Posted Mar 23, 2013 17:05 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] If firing can ruin person's life, this is a big problem with society. I don't think there's much one can do about that. For many people their job is among the things that gives their live a purpose. Therefore even if your material needs are catered for by social security benefits, being unemployed still bores the hell out of people and makes them miserable. And an elderly person in an ailing industry will have a hard time finding a new job in any society. Also, one of the (few) things that I remember from my economics classes is that there's a natural rate of unemployment, so as long as we live in anything vaguely resembling a market economy, full employment simply isn't going to happen.
freedom Posted Mar 23, 2013 19:29 UTC (Sat) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]
> I don't think there's much one can do about that. For many people their job is among the things that gives their live a purpose.
From my experience of living in Norway people here much less attached to their jobs. It could be a cultural thing, but a social protection must be playing a role here.
> And an elderly person in an ailing industry will have a hard time finding a new job in any society.
I know a person (as me he was also an immigrant) in Norway who, after loosing his engineering job here, first literally enjoyed few months of doing nothing while getting 75% of his salary, and then became a rather successful art dealer. Such stories of people of any age trying different things after quitting their jobs willingly or unwillingly are common.
I suspect that "alien industries" is a rather artificial notion caused by too much fear of loosing jobs so people stick to theirs even if long-term prospects are not good. Add to that corporate laws that favor executives like in US and the result in excessive number of big companies and industrial mono-culture and ghost towns when the companies finally die.
Was firing an over-reaction? Posted Mar 22, 2013 19:15 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> In what universe is being fired for exercising your freedom of speech a good thing?
Who ever said that freedom is free and that there should never be any consequences for exercising your freedom? And why do your freedoms matter and not your bosses? Why should his desires and freedoms be suppressed because he agreed to give you money for a while?
Your entire purpose in being employed is to be making your employer money. You are in a market selling your services, skills, and time just like somebody selling a toaster on ebay or somebody selling telephone service. There is really no difference.
No difference at all.
Your labor is just another product and you are just another salesman peddling your wares.
If you destroy your utility and threaten to cost your employer money because your behavior has damaged the relationships important partners then why should he be required to keep you employed?
This is why it's important to have a backbone in life. You just exercise your freedoms not because there is no consequence to your behavior or your actions, you should exercise your freedoms because they are right and just and you have convictions and that you are willing to stand up and be counted when it matters.
Also I think that discretion is the better part of valor. Which is why I am also a firm believer in privacy and against any sort of government encroachment or controls and I avoid disclosing information and using corporate 'cloud' services when practicable. Security matters. Strong and effective forms of encryption and plausible deniability and all that stuff matter, etc etc.
Was firing an over-reaction? Posted Mar 22, 2013 20:08 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> You are in a market selling your services, skills, and time just like somebody selling a toaster on ebay or somebody selling telephone service. There is really no difference.
There's a huge difference: employees are people. If you don't understand why that makes one heck of a difference, there's no point in even talking to you.
Was firing an over-reaction? Posted Mar 23, 2013 8:48 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Employers do not, generally, have a problem with their freedoms being suppressed by their employees. There is a huge power gap there, which shows in contract negotiation as well as at other times, ruining the libertarian fantasy of 'if it's in the contract it must have been freely agreed upon without coercion'.
And employers that exploit their employees really *do* exist. At the extreme end they enslave their employees and work them to death. At the less extreme end they merely ignore their employees requests regarding unimportant matters like health and safety until those employees turn to the greater power of the state to force them to do so. This happens frequently, whenever a sufficiently ethically dubious employer thinks it can get away with it and thinks the employee will not jump jobs as a result. (Heck, if you stay in one job for long enough, the employer may consider that it can do this even though you are in a position with normally high mobility. My previous employer did, repeatedly, and if it wasn't for the existence of employment legislation would quite happily have worked me until I was crippled by RSI and forced to resign, rather than pay much less than one month's pay to me on a keyboard that would fix the problem. Heck, they did that to previous employees. Nobody said that employers' abuse of employees is necessarily *rational* -- in that case, it was founded in a pathological fear of any capital expenditure whatsoever. And don't say "employers who think like that will go bust", this is not so if sufficiently many employers think like that, *or* if it's shared by only part of the management chain in a larger company.)
Was firing an over-reaction? Posted Mar 23, 2013 15:03 UTC (Sat) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]
> you are willing to stand up and be counted when it matters.
...
> Which is why I am also a firm believer in privacy
This sounds like a contradiction. Anonymity allows precisely to escape the need to face the consequences.
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