Sacking of LJ staff with immediate effect & without severance pay -- legal in USA?
I've read a couple of links on my f-list to the news that LJ sacked 12 of its 28 US employees without warning this week.
( Thoughts about this )
( Thoughts about this )
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I'm sure you're right :( It's really pretty terrifying. I read that Wedgwood went under earlier this week, and I could hardly believe it. I thought I'd heard it all when Woolies went down the tubes :(
Now the oil in the Ukraine (although that seems tit for tat).I found that pretty terrifying too. Where lives are concerned, I really think it shouldn't be possible to simply terminate essential services in the middle of an argument about an unpaid bill. Even power companies over here aren't allowed to do that to individual householders without some sort of independent intervention, much as I'm sure they'd love to be able to ( ... )
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I'm just about to join Insane.....have you? but more importantly are you keeping your same user name of going for a different one?
I am retired I cannot possibly make such a momentous decision!! In fact I'm going to come out until you tell me what to do, or I decide on a name all on my ownsome!!
Deeconfusedbytechnology
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It's been my experience that the classification of "contract employee" is one that's often open to abuse. I had to talk the higher-ups at St. Procrastination out of trying to classify the nursery workers as contract employees when they had the brilliant idea that this would save the church $2.46 per week per employee in taxes the church has to pay. The nursery workers clearly didn't meet the criteria for the classification. They're all teenagers and wouldn't have known any better until they suddenly received notice from the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security that they were personally responsible for paying back taxes.
This is just horrendous, coming from a *church*. With difficulty, resists temptation to say more about organised religions, and the ( ... )
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I had a guy in my office shortly after the presidential election who claimed Obama would turn us into a socialist nation. He'd just told me his sad tale of woe about his wife's trip to the emergency room costing $1,400. (He is self-employed and has no health insurance for his family. Health insurance is prohibitively expensive for private individuals in the United States.)
I raised an eyebrow and said, "In countries with socialized medicine, they pay considerably more taxes, but they get benefits from it. Like that trip to the emergency room would have cost you nothing because you'd have health care as part of being a taxpayer." That shut him right
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I'm assuming that there must be many people over there who believe that the existing provisions re: access to health care, employment protection and benefits should be revised, but presumably there aren't enough for the Democrats to have felt able to propose major changes without damaging their election prospects.
The only explanation that I can immediately think of is that the proportion of very wealthy people who can afford to make individual provision, and basically don't care about those who can't, is higher in the US than it is in European countries: high enough to swing an election against any party proposing significant change. I'm simply speculating, though.
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And I would seriously CRY when LJ and all my friends there would be GONE all of a sudden.
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Well, in fact this is one of the things about it that I find interesting.
Unions are much less powerful here than they were back in the 1970s. (What follows is my own interpretation of events, of course: I realise others might have a different POV ( ... )
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Some of the works I've read on the subject have suggested that one of the reasons is that most Americans tend to think there's always a possibility that one day they'll strike it rich (the whole "American Dream" thing), so they don't want to redesign the system in case they'll be able to profit obscenely from it one day too. I'm not so sure I believe this, although it may play a small role.
In my mind, the main problem is propaganda and apathy. As pwcorgigirl pointed out, Americans are almost brainwashed from birth about the need to be fiercely independent, the awfulness of taxes and government, and the horrors of "socialism." Most people never bother to discover the truth of matters for themselves. They're more obsessed with following the antics of celebrities, the new "opiate of the people."
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I'm glad you're interested in this, because I'm fascinated by it. It's not only the specific examples that interest me, but the broader issue about how societal attitudes change over time as (it seems to me) society evolves, and people become willing to be less selfish.
I've just posted my thoughts about that in reply to what Hib wrote above, so I won't repeat it here, but I'd be v. interested to know what you think.
In summary, though, and in response to what you've said about your surprise about the lack of a revolt, I think it's a matter of the first step having to be taken, so that people can begin to become familiar with the thinking that underlies socially responsible legislation, once that legislation has been imposed upon them.
Some of the works I've read on the subject have suggested that one of the reasons is that most Americans tend to think there's always a possibility that one day they'll strike it rich (the whole "American Dream" thing), so they don't want to redesign the system in case they'll be ( ... )
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in response to what you've said about your surprise about the lack of a revolt, I think it's a matter of the first step having to be taken, so that people can begin to become familiar with the thinking that underlies socially responsible legislation, once that legislation has been imposed upon them.
The first step is definitely the hardest, but you would think that that step had already been taken with the New Deal, which produced such highly popular programs as Social Security and Medicare. However, the Republican party routinely denounces both those programs as "socialist" and has tried for years to undermine and/or eliminate them. Luckily, the programs are so popular that they haven't succeeded (yet). But they have managed to poison the discourse with their constant repetition of anecdotes about "welfare queens" and other boogiemen ( ... )
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Anyhoo, I just finished this extremely good book called 'The United States: A People's History' by this left-wing professor called Howard Zinn. It covers lots of things (as the title suggests, I guess) like Civil Rights, the many wars etc. etc. but the focus is always on the workers, and it does a great job of explaining the anti-union pro-individualism sentiment that is so deep-rooted in America. Plus, we just finished doing the Labor Movement in American History at sxith form, so I'm feeling pretty clued-up :D
Yes, it is an astonishing situation. Reading this book really alerted me to a) the amazing talent of American employers for finding creatively unscrupulous ways of cheating their workers and b) the almost inconceivably different conception of the role of government and society in America compared to the gently-socialist countries of Western Europe.
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