Cease Firing: Why Termination of Employment Wounds Everyone

Key Points

• Termination of employment impacts workers, employers and the public in more and deeper ways than are typically acknowledged, with families sustaining serious damage beyond the loss of wages.
• Self-employment is rising, contributing to circumstances that diminish the scope of “layoffs” without reducing adverse financial impact on workers.
• Management is an alien concept grafted onto ownership to act in its behalf. But management has become a force unto itself that seeks its own ends, overwhelming ownership, repressing workers and ignoring public interests. Nothing typifies its malevolent power and illegitimacy more than termination of employment.
• Management tools such as “at will” employment, termination for “cause” and the use of intimidation to prevent the spread of labor organizations restrain workers.
• Termination of employment “for cause” is a sham excuse that is used to make employers appear saintly by comparison and wronged by malicious workers.
• Management is an ownership tool of control that is out of control, that establishes its own agenda and subverts meritocracy while maintaining the trappings of respect, convincing the public of its wisdom, diverting the input of employees and scapegoating them through terminations of employment.
• Managers are often capricious or mean spirited, pursuing their own advantage against the interests of their organizations and workers with falsely devised terminations of employment serving their ends. Variations on this theme are endless.
• Management has done a good job of hoodwinking the public into believing every lie they tell and paying the consequences of premeditated actions against workers and the public itself.
• While management washes its hands of workers, avoiding the direct costs it imposes on workers and society through termination of employment, it forces terminated employees onto public relief while reaping profits for shareholders. The public is harmed as workers suffer.
• Freelancers have insufficient recourse against abuse by management and need the public to require safeguards and regulations for their protection.
• Each group (workers, management, the public) fears the others. Disunity blocks solutions.
• Many solutions that could eliminate the need for termination of employment are available within organizations themselves but are blocked by management, especially HR, in a zealous defense against diversity that inhibits creativity and produces the need for disruption that forcefully damages resistant organizations.
• Management squelches cooperation, prevents worker participation and establishes barriers throughout their organizations in the belief that only they can dictate solutions to any problem. The result is termination of employment.
• Numerous managers are utterly obnoxious, driving away employees by their behavior or through intentional schemes designed to make them miserable.
• Workers frequently resort to passive aggressiveness to counter dumb moves by management but may also implement inane instructions out of spite. Throughout the process, resentment among workers grows and many leave voluntarily or involuntarily.
• Cooperation between workers and management could begin informally and progress with the emergence of various kinds of labor organizations, including unions. Productivity would increase and all sorts of issues would be resolved through participation rather than rejection.
• Cross-organizational placement would solve the need for employee advancement when opportunities within a specific business were insufficient. Seamless upward moves would eliminate voluntary terminations of employment along with consequent disruptions to individuals and organizations.
• Three factors: (1) volatility of employment; (2) the increase of independent contractors or freelancers; (3) the rise of low wage employment undermine the long-standing reliance of full-time employment as a provider of essential benefits such as healthcare insurance.
• General public consensus favoring minimum standards of expected income and benefits such as healthcare insurance mandates public policies that support the middle class, a new evolutionary height at odds with the traditional and neoliberal reliance on privately held capital to determine public policies. Permitting this evolutionary perspective to develop will electrify the future for workers, organizations and the public.
• Simultaneous rise of low wage employment poses a dilemma, threatening insufficient employment for sons and daughters of workers who earlier rose to middle-class status. Because we as a society identify specific standards of income and benefits previously garnered through employment as being necessary for life, abandoning workers without upholding these standards essentially means terminating their employment, cutting them loose to drift among part-time, low wage jobs when they can be found.
• Only public policy initiatives are sufficient to overcome the huge and growing problem of termination of employment due to low wage jobs.
• Many employers establish rules that are contrary to the best interests of workers and their continued employment. Regulations are needed that thwart unnecessary management interference and uphold workers and the public.
• We betray workers and create an environment conducive to termination of employment with faulty job training and insufficient, privatized education. Universities must be overhauled to provide continuous free education, thereby keeping workers fit for changing work requirements and prevent termination of employment.
• Internal appeals of termination of employment directed to HR officials are dead on arrival because they are rigged. Management does not police itself as they claim.
• Lobbyists are employed by management for the creation of laws that ensure the advantage management has over workers. The public interest is also damaged by management greed in a governmental process that has been contorted to favor the interests of management.
• Although many solutions addressing specific issues should be devised, two fundamental approaches are necessary, the organization of workers and the regulation of management.
• Managers should be recognized as workers and everyone should identify as the public possessing paramount interests.
• Quasi-judicial bodies should examine all terminations of employment with workers retaining the right to sue in court, avoiding forced arbitration.
• For solutions to be effective, they must be holistic, meshing overall need with individual circumstances while achieving the goal of justice to workers and the public, an ideal remedy that is out of reach only as long as we cling to capitalism.
• Concern with the unemployment rate is a delusion fostered by management to pretend the validity of termination of employment. There should be no terminations of employment because they are unnecessary if the public prioritizes all the elements of life that sustain and develop workers.
• Determination to assert its right to guide public policy is an important step but it is equally necessary to formulate alternatives to termination of employment. Completely established solutions will mean that the fact of voluntary termination of employment as it is currently understood will be erased with the seamless elision of workers from one job to another without breaks, a feat requiring processes that enable perpetual employment across all organizational borders.
• It is folly for the public to tolerate a private elite that designates some workers as unfit while elevating others when, rightfully, there is a place for all. For this to work, education needs to be overhauled and made free and continuous, something that management fears because it would lose control of the prejudices that currently enable its divide and conquer strategy against the public. With this change of perspective and overall guidance in place, further mechanisms required for implementation are possible.
• Envision a future in which leadership replaces management, in which the public decides policies that support rather than hinder workers, in which suitable employment is available for everyone, in which workers and their organizations are integral to the decision making of organizations. Leaders take no satisfaction in caprice and find ways to assist workers instead of eliminating them, realizing that failure is an opportunity to grow, not an excuse to terminate.
• We desperately need changes that can be implemented soon because termination of employment is aimed by management at workers but hits the public as well and eventually wounds organizations themselves.

Introduction

Apart from “someone’s dead,” the words “you’re fired” are among the most dreaded. In a society in which one’s employment determines not only income but status and personal identification, being deprived of employment body slams finances and rips away the badge of self-worth. When it destroys self-respect, the devastation can be permanent. All of this is obvious when we focus on the worker whose employment was lost and it is right to concentrate our attention on them but there are more victims that are typically unacknowledged.

Often, we overlook the damage sustained by businesses along with their customers and vendors. The public is also harmed when workers lose their jobs but ordinarily we deign only to consider the immediate costs of paying unemployment compensation that puts workers temporarily, it is said, on the dole. Actually, the cost of terminating employment is much higher than we are willing to admit; these costs also accrue faster than ever and expand into wider categories at a pace that is about to quicken.

The fact that needless terminations of employment are increasing calls for a re-examination of all areas of society impacted by this phenomenon; workers, employers and the public are included. Reappraisal is also needed for consideration of the many facets of solutions to ensure that they mesh for the greater good of all.

First, the Workers

The words “you’re fired” can come as a piercing arrow or a hot branding iron that penetrates and sears the psyche as few words can, leaving the rejected worker marked as unfit, maybe even altogether worthless. Psychologists weigh in on this matter effectively and have a lengthy track record on behalf of both workers and their former employers in an effort to mitigate psychic damage as well as blemishes on the employer. All of this has become a fetish among human resources executives who rely on lawyers to sharpen the blade of job excision without causing lawsuits even as mumbo jumbo practitioners administer words of solicitude intended as anesthetic for more or less the same reason. But none of this is particularly pertinent to conditions being addressed in this essay. Remember, too, that only the crudest managers and owners actually use the words, “you’re fired.” The proper phrase is “termination of employment,” often shortened merely to “termination,” a word that evokes execution when shorn of the reference to employment. “Layoff” is a euphemism whose time has historically come and gone as we will see a little later. Considerations here reach deeper in some ways and definitely wider on behalf of the worker whose job has been ditched.

Think about workers’ families for a moment. Or ghosts of families, in many cases extended fragments of childhood families to which younger workers continue to cling for lack of their own progeny or figments of imagined families, unborn sons and daughters birthed with an equally ephemeral idea of a spouse, these workers being too poor to undertake support of flesh and blood apart from their own precarious bodies. If we’ve cared to look, we’ve seen that workers are living longer with parents, marrying less often and at an older age and rearing fewer children all because they can’t afford the American dream realized by their parents. The out of wedlock alternative appeals to some, including mothers skeptical of reliance on what could prove to be an inconsistently employed or impecunious mate. But of the traditional families sufficiently viable to take a stab at success, the blow of losing a job can reverberate with dire consequences for children. Families trying valiantly to remain whole while homeless are not uncommon, accounting for a third of all homeless people in the United States. Cars were never intended to be condominiums. And the fact that these days both parents are expected to work is scarce relief for one when only one exists and two are necessary for minimal maintenance. Eleven million American families with at least one child struggle with a single adult breadwinner. But these difficulties fall into an area of private concern said to be outside the responsibility of the employer and thus escape scrutiny when determining the continuation of employment. Or not. And when these difficulties filter into schools or hospitals or human services departments of local governments, they arrive with stigma and are expensed grudgingly upon the public tab with loud complaints from taxpayers who claim affront rather than concern.

Just as the depth of a worker’s life is more than simply a job, so is the loss of that job more than the loss of employment for one person. Families are involved, even if that family consists of a worker and a dog or cat. Disruption is far greater when spouses and children are involved, or elderly relatives dependent on the worker or even the education and support of adult children. All members of the family of a worker whose job was terminated are required to reorient their lives and maybe their own careers should they be fortunate enough to have one. None of this is taken into consideration in the termination of employment of a worker. The costs of this “job action” mount in unaccountable ways through the disruption of other lives.

But to the point of an individual worker, twenty million of whom, for example, suffered involuntary termination of employment in 2016, still more is at stake that is not considered in the termination, that is ignored by the employer and effectively the whole society through the application of statistical analysis wherein all individuality is sacrificed to summary without regard to the fact that numerous categories course through the lives of many, topics that can illuminate if merely observed. Consider the fact that the worker has often devoted years to the development of a career, painstaking effort quite apart from formal education, endeavor that is distinct from the job itself but necessary in its fulfillment. When this essential history is tossed, its meaning disregarded, the loss is deep, the wound severe. No amount of retraining can replace this personal initiative that society claims to hold sacred but that it ignores in deference to a management decision to trim the workforce in order to serve the interests of free enterprise.

Somehow, the worker and the worker’s totally ignored family is required to adapt to upheaval while the business organization is permitted, even encouraged, to run amok with impunity. Seeking a solution, many workers are turning to freelancing while, simultaneously, many businesses are turning workers into freelancers whether they like it or not, dumping larger responsibility on the willing shoulders of society too ignorant or uncaring to pay attention. Besides the fact that freelancing is no panacea and even creates problems in its wake, businesses are rushing to dumb down their jobs to the point of checklists requiring little thought and no creativity, fast on the way to low wage status. Once this bottom is reached, businesses see no impediment to regarding workers as parts or cogs, called up by units rather than as people named, inserted and withdrawn as needed, expendable in the breach. The plan, of course, is for these low wage jobs to be done soon by robots, alleviating the pretense altogether.

Management

The onus moves to management where the stink rises noxiously from a source of clear and present danger much as sulfurous fumes can be traced directly to hell itself. Let’s not forget that bureaucracy is necessarily part of management and that the reason for it is less organization than obscuration. Management cannot even be granted the distinction between involuntary and voluntary termination of employment, because being forced to resign is really extortion. Then there is the matter of layoffs, a euphemism for mass involuntary termination of employment that is about to become anachronistic as more workers become freelancers. Add to this the fact that small businesses composed of just an owner and an average of nine workers are growing faster than large businesses, the fact that ten percent of workers are self-employed, and the fact that only a quarter of them have even a single worker besides themselves and it becomes obvious that there simply are fewer employees available to be involved in headline grabbing layoffs.

Shuffling true meaning of terms aside (“to the margins” they like to call it) helps management focus on individual “at will” employment and enables them to deny cooperative actions and union representation. Businesses, sometimes with experts specializing in intimidation, would always prefer to deal as the monolithic boss against individual supplicants. In another curious distortion of truth, the reference to “will” applies to both workers and management, presumably providing them equal ability to sever the employment relationship. Really? No. The individual worker applies or pleads or prays for employment and when it is granted through the magnanimity of management with restrictions, strings and requirements of willingness, that worker is retained by the same powerfully binding force with commensurate obligations upon each party for recompense in the event of severance through the agency of will. Really? No.

Just let a worker quit without notice and hear a fusillade of oaths and threats emanating from managers outraged by the independence of a worker who, along with peers and lacking contractural agreement, is forced by the employer to act independently. The threats pose no slight potential problems, blocked benefits, for example, such as accrued vacation time and denial of healthcare insurance. Organized blacklisting is rarely possible these days, although it exists informally in some industries and locations. But for some positions, the smack of a bad reference provided to a future prospective employer can be lethal to reemployment, reason enough to give an employee pause and make them modify their conduct. For low wage jobs, while the threat of a bad reference is merely bluster, it is nonetheless intimidation that, along with a show of anger, turns up the heat for remaining employees.

The reason for management’s bullying — actually, the reason for management — is assumption. It is presumed as a foregone conclusion that owners have the right to impose their will on employees as a consequence of enterprise ownership as if owning a business is the equivalent of owning the people who work in the business. That is the reason that, contrary to law in the world outside the workplace, employees lose so many rights when they bind themselves to a despot through employment. Owners dress all of this up in a fine suit of decorated armor, the better to make its appearance appealing in the lives of the workers it dominates. One of the ways it does this is the creation of management to preserve and extend its interests (read greed). And management has a plan, part of which deals with termination of worker employment.

In order to pursue its plan, management hatches goals, again, more ornamental fluff than substance apart from hard-core greed but it serves as a distraction and more importantly as an excuse. A near perfect excuse. In a society convinced of its righteousness as a meritocracy, almost anything can be sold under the guise of fairness and productivity and goals offer a tempting combination of both. It is received wisdom that management should establish criteria by which to judge its progress and jettison any impediment to fulfillment, serving as the sole arbiter throughout the process. Hold it right there.

It is a long way between the shop floor and the boardroom but no one seems to have responsibility for asking questions except top management. As a result, no one asks if the goals are legitimate or if there is a better way to assess them. Certainly, workers are not permitted to have input. There tends to be falseness at every step with one misstep influencing the next along the way. Not only is the evaluation gap huge, it is often a mere bureaucratic formality in satisfaction of company rules without real meaning. The result is actual practice that fails to resemble intent, but because speed is typically of the essence, the process blunders ahead at a breakneck pace. And the conclusion?

Management institutes audits that are presumably designed to appraise each step of the practice to ensure conformity with approved standards and expected outcome. This is a joke. Not only are audits rigged to accommodate the fickleness of managers, but they regularly bob and weave around issues to reach predetermined conclusions. Everyone and everything is open to compromise along the way. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter that targets were missed because the whole process is under the sway of prejudice with bias at every level that yields a flawed analysis. No matter. We’re dealing with management here and what they say goes.

And what they always say is that someone must be held responsible, a requirement of meritocracy and the expectation that everyone has adopted to satisfy the lie of it all. No one ever asks if termination of employment accomplishes a legitimate goal or even if there is a better way to approach all the issues. We merely take it for granted that when a goal is unmet, someone must be fired. So, we blunder from one assumption to another until a sacrifice is made. The current process of employment termination is no different from ancient rituals to select a victim to propitiate an unseen god. Gods of business are no more seen or understood than those of yore and sacrifices no more comprehensible.

One of the means used by management to justify its termination of employment decisions is the invention of the “for cause” excuse. Having established lengthy rules and regulations, management claims that violation of one of their dictates can be “cause” for terminating an employee’s employment. Note that consequences are not inevitable, giving management plenty of wiggle room to maneuver and protect favored offenders. But the real importance of the “for cause” claim is the benefit it bestows upon management in upholding its pretense of moral sanctity, an illusion created for public consumption designed to make management appear holy and right in its decisions. If a precious rule is violated, then, of course management is expected to expunge the offender. But there are problems with this.

The rules that are presumably being upheld are often vague, permitting inconsistencies that enable the wiggle room so valued by management. And there are so many rules and regulations that workers cannot possibly be aware of all of them and cannot, in any case, guess how management will choose to interpret them. Reasonableness is out the window. Management pretends that everything is clear, rendering their decisions just and forthright. Take, for example, the case of a baker who surreptitiously loads a fifty-pound bag of sugar through the back door of the bakery into the back of his truck. Termination of employment might seem to be in order. But consider the case of the counter attendant in that same bakery who spoons a little of the company sugar into her private coffee cup. Should she, too, be fired? Don’t assume for a moment that her employment would not be terminated. Management is nothing if not inconsistent, unreasonable, unpredictable, even crazy.

The “for cause” excuse is further complicated — in actuality but not appearance — by the fact that management goes out of its way to inhibit common understanding of its rules and regulations. Years ago, it was customary for businesses to create “handbooks” to guide the conduct of its workers and provided helpful information to them on navigating the ins and outs of some of its key regulations. Then came a court ruling that these handbooks constitute a contract between the employee and the employer. When the terms of that contract proved inconvenient for the employer, the response was to dispense with the handbook, leaving workers deeper in the dark about expectations and consequently even more vulnerable to management predation. It is impossible to know how often managers manipulate workers to satisfy their own interests, dispensing with them when some scheme is no longer serviceable, but given the nature of management, it is a certainty that workers are frequently abused in this manner. So, the claim of “for cause” is not as pure as management pretends and workers deserve no assumptions against their behavior.

But let’s make the case more complicated. Consider a situation in which a worker applies one legitimate rule with results that are contrary to another legitimate rule that might have been applied instead. Management comes along and cries foul and fired. Reason and justice say not so fast, but when did reason and justice motivate management? The deed — the damage — is done under the sanctimonious cover of “for cause,” unless, of course, the temporarily offending worker is favored by management in which case no rectification of employee conduct may ever be considered and the problem (if one exists) may be allowed to blunder ahead without modification. Or not. But it makes sense for there to be a process in place for extended consideration before action is taken against the continued employment of a worker. Instead, it is left for management to police itself and we have seen how that turns out. When expectations are truly clear and there is a channel of communication between workers and owners, it is the rare employee who will flout sincere guidance.

The question remains of the baker and how sweet or sour his gains may be. Don’t be too quick to determine that termination of employment is warranted given the meager facts as they are known. Consider other variables that may come into play such as whether or not the sugar actually left the premises of the bakery, or whether or not the sugar was contaminated and unfit for use if recovered. Again, a greater amount of consideration should be given to both management and the worker in devising a solution short of termination of employment if the possibility exists of repairing the relationship in conjunction with acknowledgement of error on the part of the baker. This is a stretch because no such requirement now exists with the full weight of assumption favoring management and termination.

Take another example fraught with complication, that of sleeping on the job. In some military situations such as guard duty, sleeping on the job has the potential for deadly consequences to slumbering troops caught unaware or to the hapless picket who could be subjected to a literal firing squad for his infraction. In the civilian world, however, possibilities of deadly results from sleep are remote except where heavy machinery or transportation is involved; yet, “sleeping on the job” remains high on the list of terminal offenses despite the fact that extenuating circumstances are as possible as compassion should be. Managers should consider scheduling demands, for example, that might require unreasonably long shifts or short breaks between them. They should also investigate other circumstances such as commuting that consumes excessive periods of time, the multiplicity of jobs required for survival and the personal travails of employees, some of which deserve accommodation.

The next level of consideration would be one of absolute certainty of error, returning to the question of the baker, in conjunction with a clearly irreparable break in his relationship with his employer. Say, for example, that the theft was accompanied by a tirade against the employer that made reconciliation impossible even if there were extenuating circumstances such as mental illness, then, yes, termination of employment might be part of the remedy, but only part, because even under these conditions, every effort should be made to heal, preventing anyone from loss. The problem, of course, is that the mental influences upon human beings are infinitely complex and cannot be fully subject to prescription no matter how benign.

To understand what is behind this arcane process of employment termination that is blamed on faceless management, we need to examine the people — the managers — who constitute management. Because they are human beings, they are flawed and when addressed as people, they are unable to hide behind the thicket of vines and thorns cultivated to protect management. Workers instinctively know this and are inclined to give individual managers a break on this basis or, conversely, to despise them personally. What we must realize is that the middle ground is the fertile plain that serves to entice and nurture individuals, extending them into the extremities as management. Many fall haplessly into the trap baited for them and become addicted to the perks offered by a class determined to make the most of its position as surrogates to owners. But they remain people and are subject to human predilections and foibles.

Key among the mistaken beliefs treasured by managers and most everyone else is the lie that management operates with the interest of their company as their uppermost consideration. The fact that this is not the case undermines the sanctity of goals as the basis of evaluation of employee conduct. Managers, in fact, have their own agendas and pursue them tenaciously. That is, when they are not being capricious. Some managers hew to carefully devised plans of self-aggrandizement designed to advance their careers while others flit seemingly aimlessly from one attraction or conflict to another according to the apparent whims of their personalities and egos. Both types are equally dangerous to substantive workers with defined perspectives. Unless employees are sufficiently artful to shift with the winds and dodge unanticipated blows, they are subject to being severed from their jobs by caprice or concentrated fury. Either way, they’ve been wronged and the manager lives to continue the pursuit of personal choices, the interest of their company nowhere in sight as managers look out for their own skins. All of this exists somewhere between the extremes of managers who dread firing workers and those who relish an opportunity for whatever kicks they get out of it, even bragging about it.

And there is still worse. Some managers use every loophole they can find in company policy to terminate the employment of workers they loathe for some petty, personal reason, perhaps what they perceive as a slight representing deeper dislike of them by workers. Some managers pursue opportunities to abuse their discretion and the monitoring resources of the company to observe and trap employees out of range of common decency and societal expectations while making a mockery of rules requiring termination of employment for “cause.” Retribution for speaking up against sexual harassment may be part of this but there are so many possible elements that no list could possibly cover the scope of misconduct by managers in the termination of employees. Excuses are often trumped up but the fact that excuses become reasons should explain the grievous nature of wrongs being perpetrated against workers. Misrepresentations used against workers in their termination of employment range from fudged facts to monstrous lies. All of this can be made to appear innocuous on the part of management with false periods of time and frames of reference for meeting expectations but there is nothing slight or benign about it. Intentional, deliberate, calculated injustice lives in the heart of numerous managers, manifested in wrongful termination of employment but also further damage to remaining workers and the organization for which the manager presumably acts. The inconsistencies necessary to administer deceit sows confusion in the workplace rendering workers uncertain of what conduct is necessary when standards clearly do not apply. If you believe the protestations of businesses themselves that their human resources rules and regulations prevent abuse by managers, then you live in the la-la land management fervently hoped you would buy.

The Public

The fact that management has been largely successful in shaping overall public perception of employment termination, engendering sympathy for itself while inculcating callousness for the plight of workers, portends a difficult task ahead in correcting the errors. It also highlights the importance of the public role in determining outcomes while simultaneously obscuring the public function. Management, it turns out, is a slick deceiver, as adept with nuance as with bald-faced lies.

Management would have the public see itself in the position of spectator to bouts of employment termination. Having portrayed itself for decades as the paternalistic minded arbiter of what is best for everyone, and having twisted the economy and public officials to its public policy will so that it rarely faces serious opprobrium except from policy wonks and leftists, management typically waltzes across the economic landscape soaking up profits to the detriment of everyone even while they sing its praises. But the bloody hands of management are busy all the while, not just picking pockets, but turning faces away from the destruction trailing in its path. Management would have the public believe it is powerless to act as workers are required to shed employment for the good of the company and what’s good for the company, of course, is good for everyone. Citizens buy this line year after year despite the fact that they, too, are workers subject to the capricious whims of management hell-bent on greed at the expense of the “everyone” they claim to hold dear.

If people would pause for a moment, they could hear that the lie animating the voice of management is clear. Even a cursory glance should make it evident that customers and clients are impacted by the termination of employment of people they have come to know and rely upon. Management, of course, denies this byproduct, citing the need to shore up a sagging bottom line. It always comes down to this with management and the public always buys it. What is brazen ego for managers translates to added difficulty for customers and vendors forced to adapt. But the impact on the public is much, much more extensive.

The impact of employment terminations on society as a whole is broad and deep. Making it worse, management has a habit of ignoring the direct costs of unemployment and low wages. When workers are paid less than a living wage or when their employment is terminated, causing financial upheaval for them and their families, businesses turn their back on responsibility. They’re following the law, after all. And workers who seek public assistance with food, shelter and medical treatment, also follow the law with the result of expenses on the public tab. The response of the public, when it responds at all, does so, not to the termination of employment, but to the burden these out of work former employees heap upon taxpayers. The role of management goes unnoticed and workers are made to appear the villain. In truth, management is piggybacking the taxpayer because it calculates that workers will supplement their poor wages with public relief programs and once workers are off their payroll roster, they can point out that businesses pay taxes along with individual citizens. Lost here is the fact that workers also pay taxes into state unemployment insurance funds and the fact that taxpayers are not mugged arbitrarily but are subject to policy set by public officials who follow the lead of businesses by ignoring the plight of workers and making it worse through the rules they establish. The unwillingness of public officials and management to confront problems and realize their magnitude is astonishing in what is supposed to be a representative democracy.

Essentially not represented are freelancers who are expected to soon constitute half of all professional workers. While it is true that an increasing number of workers choose freelancing for a variety of excellent reasons, their choice helps perpetuate the myth that almost all freelancers prefer employment without attachment to a continuous workplace. Although we need to realize that the nature of modern work is veering away from a perpetual employer model, we should not overlook that numerous freelancers embark on their freeform careers with a strong shove from an employer. That can happen through a change of company policy that sheds employees in favor of independent contractors or it can result from action taken against the continued employment of an individual. The decision to become a freelancer can also arise from the personal animosity of a manager that translates from obnoxiousness and harassment into the relief derived from quitting the employer.

The public problem stems from the lack of policies that support workers unjustifiably under the gun in their workplaces and freelancers, once those employees decide to go on their own. It would be nice to be able to attribute scarcity of policies on the ignorance of aging lawmakers who haven’t kept up with the times (and there is a great deal of that) but given the fact of all other institutional failures that slam workers willy-nilly against walls, it’s less a matter of benign neglect than willful failure. It is in the interest of owners and bigtime managers who are responsible for the bulk of political contributions to keep freelancers dangling at their mercy. Many issues are involved. Healthcare for independent workers has received much attention lately but one of the greatest challenges freelancers face is collecting fees for work performed on behalf of recalcitrant, slow paying or no paying organizations that shirk their obligations. Often, unjustified claims of dissatisfaction with work performance whittles down compensation with little recourse available. This is a public issue not a private failure; avoidance will lead to further consequences.

Solutions

But avoidance is exactly the path followed by the overwhelming majority in all three groups — workers, owners/management, the public — and for the strangest reason, fear. Workers tremble at the thought of dealing with owners and management despite vastly outnumbering them; management quakes at the prospect of unified* and determined workers; the public fears everyone despite the fact that they are everyone. Riding a parallel rail is the fact that no one in the three groups is comfortable looking for solutions or examining them once they are located. Solutions to problems associated with termination of employment, in fact, are easy to find and only difficult to implement because of disunity.

As a start, it helps to realize that solutions apply to all kinds of organizations, wherever employees are to be found, whether businesses, nonprofit organizations or government bureaucracies. Surely members of the public can find themselves there somewhere given that everyone is a worker, a potential or retired worker or a family member of a worker, even if that work consists of high-end management. Could it be that the whole society is shot through with guilt associated with work and the termination of employment? If so, avoiding the examination of solutions will never produce an answer and the survival of human society may depend upon that exact consideration.

Having reluctantly acknowledged our collective culpability and commonality as human beings, the next admission is that the failures of management can be remedied by them within their organizations. Start with the hiring process. If employees are to be lost through termination of employment, it stands to reason that at least some of the fault can be traced all the way to the beginning. Management knows this and many organizations devote considerable attention and resources to screening and hiring procedures, but, like many bureaucracies, it’s the procedure, the process they devote themselves to instead of their applicants. They listen to themselves, not their employment candidates, hearing what they want to hear and searching for what they want to find. If they come up empty-handed they think it’s because the applicants weren’t the “right fit” for them without acknowledging that the organization was not the right fit for the applicant and never considering the possibility that it might be helpful for the organization to change in order to accommodate the applicant or that other employees might be immediately ready to accept the applicant. They have ear only for the jargon they anticipate, the in-crowd buzzwords that key them to their comfort zone of sameness, of rigid conformity to the expected and sanitized acceptance. Imagination is not in the job description of a manager; it’s too dangerous a concept to admit into most organizations and certainly too volatile to trust in the hands of someone whose life is dedicated to conformity. Human resources departments stake their reputations on being able to weed out the threat of iconoclastic ideas, indeed, of any thinking at all. They believe that’s what the screening process is about and they devote themselves to it with effective vengeance.

For those stuck in the Industrial Age management mindset, improved screening and employment application process is one in which deviation is spotted quickly and the carriers of the disease are removed summarily before employment, thus eliminating the need for termination. What they don’t realize is that by concentrating predictability and lack of variety within their organization, they are setting themselves up for an eventual need of disruption whether from outside competition or simply internal pressures that have no outlet besides explosion. In either case, terminations of employment will result that could have been prevented. A growing number of up-to-date organizations recognize that diversity is critically important, that listening is essential and that evolution is inevitable. It is better to welcome variations and provide an atmosphere of nourishment, permitting ideas to take shape and move the organization with them. In such conditions, involuntary terminations of employment will rarely be needed and voluntary separations will be minimized because workers and organizations can grow together.

The suggestion that workers and their employers should be together on something seems redundant but only if you buy the capitalist myth that it’s right and natural and the way things are — oh, and under the supervision of management, of course, maintaining the fiction of employer/employee togetherness. Actually, management creates barriers to cooperation with workers based on its presumption of control. By stepping aside and admitting full cooperation, much more could be accomplished. But under the present domination of Industrial Age management mindset, that’s impossible, meaning that everyone must settle for half measures and even these are often thwarted.

Each organization needs to determine for itself what partially effective steps suitable to the specifics will be taken that can eliminate the need for employment terminations. This means that planning needs to occur. Management believes it is all over that under the mistaken assumption that control is equivalent to planning along with the imposition of goals. What could be clearer? Perceive a need, determine a solution, establish a goal and implement actions to reach the goal. Planning, right? Only in the mind of an autocrat. Where, in all of that, is the spirit of cooperation? Where is the acceptance of all parties when there isn’t even any consultation? For those who protest that planning requires long-term calculation best made by only very few people, management is ready with one of their stock answers tailored for every imaginable situation. They believe a few meetings will take care of everything. They love meetings, overlooking the fact that not only are most meetings a morass of mediocrity, they are conducted under the same authoritarian auspices that devised them as a distraction in the first place.

Direct participation involving all workers is likely to turn up workable means that addresses issues while supporting the continuation of employment. Again, each organization must grapple with options that are suitable for their particular circumstances. One of the least controversial for budgetary reasons and threats to internal fiefdoms is cross-training. There are many other possibilities that fall short of perfection but that are viable and helpful on an interim basis. Observant managers may notice, even if they are unwilling to admit it, that workers often cobble together unofficial workable remedies to problems that result in avoidance of job losses but these temporary fixes are apt to be eventually swept aside by interference from on high.

The reason that permanent solutions remain elusive despite being readily apparent, lies in the faulty nature of management. Although there are many management related issues that reverberate widely throughout an organization, some have especially significant impact on employment. Let’s face it: many managers are jerks and all the safeguards presumably built into company policies and all the purportedly well-intentioned cheerleading from HR with their flood of memos can’t restrain managers who choose not to restrain themselves and whose own bosses set the example by being free-range fools behaving offensively, harming workers and damaging the organization just because they can get away with it, giving full vent to their inherent obnoxiousness. As if being a bundle of perversity isn’t sufficient problem, it tends to become outright harassment, driving employees elsewhere. It’s virtually impossible for management to admit this, but many workers, operating from a basis of principles and ethics, are driven away from organizations, not simply through ill-mannered behavior and verbal as well as physical abuse, but also because they value the work they are doing and detest seeing it destroyed by uncaring superiors.

Many factors come into play and sensitive leaders will encourage exploration of each of them. As an example, and to serve notice of importance and the need to delve into everything, the subject of passive aggressiveness deserves examination. The problem of passive aggressiveness is pervasive in the workplace despite being largely ignored by all parties. On a case-by-case basis, passive aggressiveness is highly destructive but it is also infectious and endemic; excising it from an organization is impossible as long as the concept of management instead of leadership holds sway because management is rooted in control and the whole reason behind passive aggressiveness is to object covertly. In other words, passive aggressiveness is perfectly symptomatic of all that ails organizations, both in form and expression, although specific manifestations are infinite. Workers exercise passive aggressiveness when, despite being formally powerless to act according to their inclinations and expertise, they obstruct, delay and undermine the intent and directions of management on either a long-term basis or very briefly. But top management is oblivious to attacks on its will because the ego of managers, especially at the top, is so massive it is virtually impenetrable, preventing them from realizing the truth. Subordinate management mimics every aspect of their superiors as closely as possible, including the dense conceit, deterring acknowledgement that their instructions are being altered or ignored entirely. The irony that heaps upon the top of passive aggressiveness is that every level of worker including managers engage in the practice and perhaps the ultimate contrariness comes from a sort of reverse passive aggressiveness in which subordinates merrily or sullenly enact inane instructions that they know are foolish but implement them out of spite.

The question, completely ignored by management that is unaware of anything amiss, concerns why workers would universally adopt passive aggressiveness, especially consistently and on such a large scale. There are likely as many different reasons as there are workers, but all of them result from a desire to claw back some self-respect, regain a sense of control over their work environment and the elements impacting their work. Solving the problem of passive aggressiveness in the workplace would produce a gigantic boost to productivity while making every worker, including managers at all levels, happier and providing a sense of accomplishment. The solution requires far more than patting workers on the head or acknowledging them in some trivial way in order to fulfill the axiom that employees need more recognition or even the presumption that bosses take credit for the ideas of their underlings. What is needed is an understanding among all workers of the role of passive aggressiveness in the workplace and how it factors into motivation. It would greatly help if workers could cooperate at all levels to resolve the specific issues that prompt them to resort to passive aggressiveness. The bottom line regarding the issue is that workers use passive aggression as a means of staunching their fed-up annoyance, prompting them to look elsewhere for employment because when anger boils over visibly, involuntary termination of employment can result. Sometimes, too, the passive aggressive tendency to be contrary mushrooms into more obvious acts of defiance and even blatant sabotage leading to, of course, termination of employment. Needless to say, also, is that the deportment and attitudes of managers feed the vicious cycle of passive aggression in which managers participate both as players and played.

It should be clear to management, although it is not, that they need help. Non-management workers stand ready to bring assistance from outside. In fact, workers already provide help for themselves in the form of peer pressure, the type of guidance that serves to curb the behavior of other workers that could turn into something intolerable to management and thus lead to termination of employment. But these subtle, unofficial efforts could be converted into sanctioned remedies built into systems of consultation. The mechanism would mean acknowledgement of labor organizations of some type, not necessarily unions, but close to it, and full-fledged unions could emerge from systems intended to stimulate answers to limited problems. When management breaks through walls of its own construction, it has realized the willingness and ability of labor organizations to provide stability in the workplace and enforce codes of reasonable conduct among workers. Often, for example, management has only the weakest sway through example and procedure to influence workers positively while labor unions offer outlets for grievances and concerns that are effective. Rather than depending on the whims and happenstance of management, workers, knowing that they can trust their own representatives to evaluate fairly and thoroughly, will conform to acceptable standards that might elude a squad of management enforcers.

The key, so often missing, is cooperation. Make no mistake about it, management is the entity holding back progress. Labor organizations have the advantage of being able to bring diversity of perspective to bear on all questions with the result of a just determination beneficial to everyone. Management, however, as always, insists on exclusive control. Originally, the right to sole decision making authority rested upon ownership but with the imposition of management, allegedly to act on behalf of owners, the right should have been forfeited because management, as a class, acts on its own interests, paying homage to ownership only grudgingly and only when forced because it believes powerfully in itself against all others. Cooperation means the participation of others in the decision-making process, a prerogative management is reluctant to concede, however demonstrable the positive results might be. Top management often withholds information from subordinate managers in order to empower itself against the fear that managers at lower levels would essentially revolt and bolt for greener pastures. Such deceitful management should be broken from because eventually its perverseness will consume itself, leaving a shell to crumble under the slightest pressure. Organizations that adopt full communication among all workers with shared decision-making authority are proving to be fit for the future. It should be obvious that if workers have sufficient input into decisions, they will help craft real, viable solutions to problems that obviate the need to consider terminations of employment.

But management above all fears the next step which would be employee ownership of businesses. While companies founded on an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) format are more numerous than many people realize, as presently constituted, they do not pose a mortal threat to existing enterprises. Although it is unsurprisingly true that employee job security is typically baked into these plans resulting in lower turnover and reduced rates of involuntary terminations of employment, it is also true that they mostly follow the predictably hierarchical management format of Industrial Age management mindset organizations. What management fears is democratic decision making and widely dispersed authority, conditions that spread control more evenly throughout all workers. Considered from an engineering point of view, the democratic process is much stronger because stress focused on vulnerable management connections is more apt to break the structure than when applied on a system designed for self-support wherein all elements cooperate. To be successful in the future, businesses must thoroughly deploy the democratic ideal, not merely the perfunctory aspect of dispensing profits. True ownership is much more than calculating dollar value and issuing certificates. That is why employees cringe when bosses tell them to “take ownership” of their jobs despite management actually denying them any meaningful role in determining processes, let alone outcomes, even within the limited scope of their own lowly job description. Employees yearn for the chance to demonstrate their competence by making decisions that will guide their work and bring it to fruition by cooperating with other workers in an atmosphere of mutual respect that lifts tentative qualities to confirmed and consistent ability while affirming each other with little need of exercising the power of banishment that management regularly utilizes for intimidation. Enlightened start-ups are seizing the opportunity to enjoy the advantages of democratic leadership from the beginning, greatly boosting their chances of success. Existing management, however, is afraid of being overrun by cooperative decision making without realizing that deliberate planning is required to convert structures not otherwise suited to survive changes rapidly taking place in the world. In the private economy that grew Industrial Age management mindset organizations, revolution cannot topple management but their own obtuseness can make them disappear from the updated world like the dinosaurs they are. In fact, these old-style organizations will vanish as newer thinking takes hold.

The best internal solutions to employment termination are organic, germinating with workers themselves and sprouting in fields fertilized for their acceptance and growth. The fruit is harvested not merely in traditionally weighed profits, but also by the heftiness of contentment, not complacency, but satisfaction with having a suitable environment for work. Note that these solutions are not instructions to be followed but perceptions to be explored permitting intuitive steps forward. Advancement of various kinds will be observed, not through checking off one rank after another military style, not through acquiring a series of fiefdoms, but through cooperation that elevates the abilities of workers permitting greater manifestation of accomplishment. Advancement could replace termination of employment, partly because many of the solutions that prevent involuntary termination of employment would allow workers to progress naturally. While advancement might be visible within the parameters of an employer, it could also extend into different organizations, some, possibly, growing from the original, others being the magnet that draws workers possessing particular strengths. But this type of voluntary termination of employment would be natural; it would be organic in the sense of growth instead of the current method of calculation, deviousness and selfishness. Real solutions from within an organization consists of overturning the problems, acknowledging not merely culpability of various participants, but the viability of cooperation. Management typically wants no part of cooperating with employees, preferring to direct and control them instead, setting the stage not merely for resistance but also solutions from outside the organization.

Public Policy Solutions

Individualism and self-reliance are idealized by Americans and rightly so in many respects, especially in the early days of continental settlement when workers were primarily self-employed and operated alone. But that spirit of independence has been betrayed by large businesses and demagogues who appeal to workers on the basis of traits that eroded long ago, beliefs that now encumber rather than liberate workers. A look at the travails of modern freelancing is instructive because workers need to open their eyes to current reality and shed myths that bind them to a past unresponsive to contemporary needs.

Increasingly, “professional” workers are freelancers; as such it might seem that they are not rightly part of a discussion of employment termination because of their separate, independent status in the workforce. But we have to consider why they are separate and independent, immediately illuminating their link to large employers who either eliminated them from their employment rosters or who decline to hire them directly. Either way, the freelancer has a relationship with traditional employers under terms that are both inadequate and in flux. Lately, more people are realizing some of the disadvantages experienced by freelancers in the free market economy, among them the difficulty of collecting pay for the work they produce. Also of note, is the need for healthcare insurance that is typically associated with the package of benefits accessed through direct employment.

Unfortunately, many of us overlook the meaning of healthcare insurance apart from its utility. What it signifies is necessity, so much so that our nation and many other contemporary societies deem it necessary to provide insurance to the elderly and children who are obviously not part of the workforce. As long as employment provided insurance to its many full-time workers, Americans were content to expect self-employed individuals to fend for themselves by acquiring private insurance, albeit with frequently high charges. Despite advantages to employers, especially very large employers, this model worked fairly well for a long time, at least as long as the American manufacturing juggernaut dominated world markets.

But changes are well underway that undermine the employer based healthcare insurance mandate quite apart from the rapidly escalating cost of health coverage in recent years. Essentially, there are three factors: (1) volatility of employment; (2) the increase of independent contractors or freelancers; (3) the rise of low wage employment. It is lately fashionable and very correct to recognize the anticipated role of increased automation and implementation of artificial intelligence that will have enormous impact on labor markets in coming years and that already presents a challenge, but automation in the workplace will influence all three categories and properly deserves consideration elsewhere. Also, it should be noted that the increase of freelancing is part of labor volatility, but it is a special case for several reasons and should also be considered separately.

Everyone knows a few people who were previously employed at a traditionally established organization and who “decided” to become a “consultant.” Whether or not the worker decided or the organization decided is immaterial given the often-indistinguishable line between being forced out and being fired, termination of employment is the result. And so, the army of “consultants” grows, composed of workers who largely do more work than consulting; that is, these freelancers are likely merely workers performing the same work that direct employees previously executed instead of serving in a more exalted capacity. Work still needs to be done and management can be expected to preserve its prerogatives. But something has changed.

A new class of worker has been created out of the flesh and bone of a previously full-time directly employed workforce. The antecedents cannot be ignored, workers whose lives incorporated expectations of humanity in a complex affluent society that determined the necessity of supplying standards of living including income and healthcare. Those standards were established before the rise of independent contracting and society mandates that they be continued, even after the character of employment is altered. Not everyone agrees, leading to the fight over provision of reasonably priced healthcare insurance, but the majority of Americans finally reached a decision favoring accessibility. This was a momentous choice that positions society to place demands on the organizations and government that serve it, signifying that human values take precedence over corporate profits.

Evolution of thought about meeting human necessities devolved upon full-time workers at a critical moment in the evolution of the economy and it occurred just in time to see freelancing rise from the structure of Industrial Age management mindset employers. A new baseline of expectation was established as independent contractors brought their social status with them into this new realm of employment, accompanied by higher expectations of human consideration. It is out of the question to treat middle class workers with disrespect.

There is now general agreement and reluctant consensus about respect and the need to ensure the terms of that respect for respectful people, workers, after all, and middle class. This means that the force of public policy must be brought to bear on the remnant of kicking and screaming objectors who cling to the past and who would rather do anything but see public policy used in support of less than the top layer of ownership, a concept as old as dirt, as bloody as war and as despicable as slavery. But the fact of public policy imposition for the reason of ensuring humanitarian treatment for middle-class workers no matter how or even if they are employed is resoundingly important. It means that public policy has risen to a new level of significance, both socially and in law and it is that forcefulness of public policy that brings us to a momentous point from which to launch the future.

If timing is not exactly everything, it is absolutely necessary as a catalyst for anything new, any change that is leastwise progressive. For now, on the heels of establishing the role of public policy in securing humane treatment of middle class workers regardless of circumstances, we are faced with rising low wage employment. How will society react now? What, if anything, will be the application of public policy to a situation in which wages sag even as employment rises and the sons and daughters of the middle class are unable to rise above a minimum level of remuneration? Keep in mind that the intent was the survivability of standards when applied to middle-class workers. What now? That is the current dilemma, its gravity now dawning on the consciousness of a confused but roused public. Complicating the question is the fact that many of the most vulnerable citizens caught in the maw of a disrupted capitalistic economic system are not freelancers or well-educated consultants but former manufacturing workers who attained middle-class respectability before being abandoned by the system whose rules they followed and who now must scrounge low wage work if any is to be found. Again, what now? And what has any of this to do with termination of employment?

The conundrum now facing workers and the public stems from the fact that most everyone who wanted full-time employment with its benefits of sufficient livelihood, healthcare and prospects for a reasonable future had this sort of life merely for working for it. But now the formerly dependable elements of their world have disappeared or are threatened, in effect, sweeping away their prospects for a secure future. For all intents and purposes, the employment of workers has been terminated. So, here we are, having attained standards and made promises to workers that are either no longer being kept or are under threat of being yanked away. A problem this fundamental cannot be remedied from within separate organizations.

A solution must be imposed through public policy acting on behalf of all workers in every organization. The reason that the rate of compensation and the inclusion of healthcare insurance is so important (beyond their intended effectiveness) is that they signify employment. Remove these elements and employment is gone — terminated. The remedy is only through public policy. But the continued spread of low wage, typically part-time employment means that most workers have had their employment terminated, raising the question of what to do about the increase of jobs that are inherently substandard, their inadequacies based upon failure to meet essential expectations of employment. If the protections and benefits that were earlier established for workers are to be extended to the spreading class of low wage workers, public policy must again be addressed on their behalf. The willingness of the public to make these new demands on behalf of low wage workers will determine much in the short term. In the meantime, we must consider low wage workers who are required to cobble together multiple part-time jobs in order to survive. And given that they are workers, their employment must be thought of as having been terminated. What to do? Again, the situation is so extensive and growing that no organization can solve the problem on its own. Kudos to those organizations that undertake to offer full-time employment at a living wage, but the business model of many companies requires low wages to maintain a level of competitiveness such that their competitors will not drive them out of business. This attitude requires the offer of public assistance to workers unable to survive on the meager wages available. Thus, public policy must step in with a solution applicable to every organization on behalf of every worker.

We have already observed that laws and regulations are inadequate to address the needs of freelancers and independent contractors as well as, and even more so, low wage workers. These insufficiencies point to a broad sweep of repression against workers generally who are picked on in innumerable ways, fleeced for fees, imprisoned needlessly, hounded for debt incurred for the basics of life and on and on. Think of any subject and there are ways that public policy is needed to help workers. But we must not lose sight of the focus on termination of employment. If you look carefully at the myriad manifestations of need, it is clear that management forces these issues constantly against workers in a seemingly nonsensical attempt to push them away, that is, away from employment, at least on the terms we have cited as minimal expectations in our society. Look a little more closely and you see that employers establish many regulations of their own that are intended to constrain workers unnecessarily, arbitrarily, or in some way to the advantage of management. Not infrequently, workers are not even aware of these regulations and rules that can easily trip up well-intentioned, conscientious workers. But other workers, including less naïve, even savvy operators, might find employer requirements objectionable enough that they either flout employer edicts or take them up in an organized campaign with other workers to overturn them. Either way, including instances in which workers voluntarily terminate their employment because of these requirements, termination of employment is the result. A prime example of workers running afoul of employer rules involves the use of social media where both intentional criticism and accidental missteps can land workers in hot water or send them out the door.

The social media example also points to one of the largest failings in the American workplace and signals an area where solutions are possible and badly needed. In many different ways, workers are unprepared for the workplace and education is a prime remedy. Failure to prepare workers of every type from manual labor (yes, that’s still with us) to the most technically demanding and esoteric pursuits. Just as complex endeavors multiply and increase in scope, educational needs expand endlessly and no one is keeping up. Part of the focus is training received on the job but a great portion of educational inadequacy is traceable to the structure of the educational process and the fact that, at least in the United States, much of this is private with each individual responsible for acquiring sufficient education by paying for it as well as determining a course and learning everything needed to ensure personal success in an environment where others are eager to lay claim.

To some extent, the insufficiency of basic knowledge is obvious in the workplace. Partly, this is technical and must be supplied with specifics applicable in tightly defined employment. But part of it is much broader and includes cultural references as well as general knowledge and legal rights. Just as it is appalling how many people are arrested with no idea of what rights they maintain and those they forfeited upon seizure, it is shocking how little employees know about their rights and obligations in the workplace. Clearly, the scope of education needs to expand. In recent years, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses have justifiably received a great deal of emphasis, but the cultural and social aspects of education including languages, communication and what were known as “civics” should also have renewed consideration. We must not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by STEM education because life is much more than scientific facts and culture evolves just as technology increases and to be bereft of one is to try to walk on one leg. Workplaces, for example involve social environments as much as technical processes and workers are unable to function without being educated in both.

One shortcoming of training provided by employers involves its parochial nature. The excuse used by management, understandably enough, is simply that they are providing the most cost-effective training possible, the shortest route to sufficient instruction to perform a task, a claim that should not be taken at face value. Despite wailing about the need to increase productivity, management causes a great deal of time to be wasted, much of it egotistically, manipulating the focus to self-glorification more than information. The further afield from dry facts that they stray, the more that they try to manipulate the minds of workers, the more damage management inflicts on everyone. Without realizing it, management builds resentment through its training programs that feeds passive aggressiveness, but it intentionally and consciously misleads employees while misappropriating the resources of their organization.

If specific training programs and processes are justifiably left to employers, it seems obvious that the broad sweep of education remains the responsibility of public schools. But that is only a fraction of the tale. Increasingly, especially with the rise of charter schools, elementary and secondary education is private, much to the detriment of public schools and the well-being of society as a whole. By fobbing off education as basically a private responsibility with only a passing acknowledgement of minimum skills being made available through public schools to the children of low income parents, everyone — workers, employers and the public — miss key elements essential to modern life, especially as the future unfolds in an era of artificial intelligence and expanding diversity.

The only viable approach to education is a complete revision of our perspective. We stubbornly hold the inherited view that education is a finite experience, forcing ourselves onto a rigid track that inputs information once and asks for confirmation of its retention a few times before declaring immutable success forevermore. Once upon a time, that worked. No longer. Workers who thread the course of a future that changes at lightning speed need an educational system that starts early and never stops. Given that we’re all in this together, education needs to be purely public, available equally to everyone and relentlessly continuous. Among other things, this means that the role of universities must shift from a truncated structure with prescribed checklists to a seamless flow in which everyone ceaselessly connects dots peculiar to their needs and interests throughout a lifetime.

Workers need to get started now on their own unique educational path, deploying the best possible use of university programs while encouraging them to modify their offerings to help them achieve a more realistic and continuous result. Workers also need to demand that public policy be brought to bear for the implementation of revised, continuous education. Organizations stuck in the Industrial Age management mindset will watch helplessly as their businesses fail under the onslaught of need for ceaselessly educated workers and workers need to keep up. Termination of employment under these blistering circumstances is obvious. But education is not the only realm of what is fundamentally a currently private world that needs a kick in the ass from reformative public policy in order to prevent widespread, society debilitating termination of employment.

Management famously claims to police itself and it shells out big bucks to convince people of that. Workers have a different experience but often yield to management at the ballot box, a peculiar divergence that bears closer examination, first in the workplace where management is responsible for what happens. Almost everyone has worked somewhere, necessarily absorbing at least some of the hypocrisy and malevolence that oozes from management like a diseased corpse. None of the myriad specifics are necessary to recount, the seriousness of all error being sufficient to project its pertinence, although it is helpful to recall that any slight difficulty anyone encounters in any workplace is magnified by the numerous employees afflicted by it. Consider, too, that where problems may seem trivial to one, they are critical to another and that management manifests itself with as many variations of as many issues as there are managers with some being more ferocious than others, more apt to slime workers. By the time you add that to institutional abuse mandated by company regulations and neglect and you have disenchantment hardening into passive aggression and eventually into a need to fight back, conflicts the organization is bound to win, wielding termination of employment in the process.

With their back to the wall, no individual worker acting separately apart from a position coordinated with other workers through a labor organization can dream of winning against management. HR tries to pretend that it is there for workers to ensure fair treatment. They lie. When it comes time to terminate the employment of a worker, HR, regardless of how much they smile, always sides with management. As part of management, HR sells its reason for being partly on the grounds of saving money which means cutting costs and preventing avoidable expenses such as legal fees. That’s why the manager who pulls the trigger on an employee will tell them that they can appeal the decision to a designated representative of HR, often an in-house labor lawyer. If a serious attempt to obtain justice is contemplated through bureaucratic governmental channels (EEOC) or the courts, following any appeals process established by the employer is a prerequisite. But if the employee whose job was lost actually believes that they have a chance through appeal to the designated HR official, they are foolish. The employer’s appeal process is always rigged. Comes now the bugaboo of collusion, the not illegal or more than quasi-secret but nonetheless unethical arrangement between the appeals representative and the firing manager to wit: You fire ’em and I’ll back you up when they call.

Behind the whole corrupt process is the law and behind the law are the lobbyists, employed by management to influence and even write laws that sustain the will and advantage of employers. Everything is stacked against workers everywhere they turn. Employment is like a canyon with management on one side and lobbyists and laws on the other. Employees are required to thread their way through as best they can, their initiative, abilities and self-respect subject to constraint by management and lobbyists.

And where is the public in all this? Trailing employees through the same dangerous passage. And that is perhaps the most disgusting fact of all because, unless roused enough to throw the rascals out, the public is just as intimidated and just as impotent as workers in the face of management control. The existence of lobbyists and the temerity with which they operate in complete disregard of the public interest is a demonstration of the greed that blocks justice in preference to those who can dominate the entire ground between right and wrong and render the proceeds for themselves. Lobbyists are an extension of the obnoxiousness and harassment of management and they are so thorough that they leave not a single green twig for employees, incinerating all benefits even to the point of preventing access by employees to the courts, substituting instead legalized larceny through forced and rigged arbitration in the few instances where objections of any kind surface. Rectification of terminations of employment is chief among the casualties, a fact that reverberates through the public at large even when it is not recognized.

Once employment is terminated, irreparable damage is done. The former employee is frequently forced upon public assistance in order to survive and sustains psychological trauma with lasting consequences. In addition, suitable future employment is uncertain, adding stress and impacting families. Over the course of on-again off-again employment, public assistance to workers is apt to be both for rescue and maintenance, this in a society that, led by private interests augmented by management, brags about individualism, bootstrap tenacity and personal responsibility. But dreaming doesn’t make it so and the public is waking up to the fact that they are footing the bill for fiction instead of reality. Not only that, the public is beginning to realize that they are paying for continuous patch and repair jobs claimed by management to be the fault of workers while simultaneously funding management itself and doing so on a grand scale. The twin forks of public participation, heretofore camouflaged by demagoguery and outright fraud, are becoming visible. So is a double-pronged solution.

For a long time, the public tipped its hat and bowed its head so low to management that it failed to see the hard-edged gleam of greed in management’s eyes and teeth. It failed to realize that it is neither fair nor right for management to organize itself for its own purposes while demanding that workers remain splintered and ineffective as a countervailing force. It also failed to recognize its own potential as an agent of change on behalf of justice, which, after all, amounts to power to set things right for everyone. Not only that, it is at the critical point of termination of employment that the public realizes the value of its potential because there is obviously nothing right about past and future — continuous — loss of employment. And the remedy itself is now coming to light as a double whammy for the cause of justice, that workers should be organized and that the public should exercise its right of regulation.

Conclusion

Meanwhile, the arrogance of management blazes brightly and the advantages of universal basic income are a mere glimmer in the distant future. Problems of the present require attention to find solutions that can be implemented now. Currently, management is so full of itself that it fails to recognize that managers are workers, too, and that all workers cooperating through labor organizations can achieve more for everyone by identifying as the public. Presently, the public and the government it theoretically constitutes are dominated by management the same as if they are subsidiaries of a business.

As long as we are grossly deluded by the force-fed chicanery of management, it will be impossible to devise a proper solution to the loss of employment even as workers are needed. Here they are no longer wanted; there they are needed. It is a paradox that cannot be resolved by the fire-here hire-there approach dictated by capitalism with its perspective of compartmentalization that claims to square circles. Insistence that problems are the workers themselves, solvable only with a pink ticket to oblivion, is not the answer. The problem is now squatting on the face of workers and threatens to smother them in place, shushing feeble whimpers of objection even as urgency mounts for adequate response.

False words weigh heavily: Layoff. Reduction. Cutback. Downsizing. Trimming. Elimination of shift. Temporary abatement of employment. Scaling back. Buyout. Early retirement. Cutting hours. Termination of employment. You’re fired. These are euphemisms for over, done, useless, old, former, used up, outdated, swept away, dead. And they are unnecessary.

The fact that “layoffs” will diminish as workers become independent contractors offers no consolation. Termination of employment is only as old as employment, basically a nineteenth century invention of capitalism, itself a recent phenomenon emerging from ancient greed but with a modern twist, dry of passion and protection. We must question every assumption that presently guides our behavior and our attitudes. Two steps that could be taken immediately are the encouragement of labor organizations and implementation of a quasi-judicial review of management decisions regarding termination of employment backed by worker rights to access courts as opposed to accepting arbitration. But something important is missing from being satisfied with these partial solutions. Urgency is needed for more extensive remedy. Workers — everyone, that is — cannot afford to wait for the presumably jobless future funded by a cornucopia of supply.

Damage through termination of employment is obvious to workers and their families, but a broad assessment is needed that will demonstrate how firing workers weakens businesses and other organizations. Laying out the facts, categorically, anecdotally and statistically, each in detail, will better illuminate how the public is damaged by termination of employment. Then, perhaps, the public will be roused to exercise its right to determine public policy solutions required to address the entire scope of issues involved.

For solutions to be effective, they must be holistic, meshing overall need with individual circumstances while achieving the goal of justice to workers and the public, an ideal remedy that is out of reach only as long as we cling to capitalism. Concern with the unemployment rate, for example, is a delusion fostered by management to pretend the validity of termination of employment. There should be no terminations of employment because they are unnecessary. The public should identify as workers, realizing that termination of employment is an important but unnecessary source of devastation in their lives.

Determination to assert its right to guide public policy is an important step for the public but it is equally necessary to formulate alternatives to termination of employment. Completely established solutions will mean that the fact of voluntary termination of employment as it is currently understood will be erased with the seamless elision of workers from one job to another without breaks, a feat requiring a transformation of perspective about work engineered by processes that enable perpetual employment across all organizational borders. It is folly for the public to tolerate a private elite to designate some workers as unfit while elevating others when, rightfully, there is a place for all. For this to work, education needs to be overhauled and made free and continuous, something that management fears because it would lose control of the prejudices that currently enable its divide and conquer strategy against the public. With this change of perspective and overall guidance in place, further mechanisms required for implementation are possible.

Envision a future in which leadership replaces management, in which the public decides policies that support rather than hinder workers, in which suitable employment is available for everyone, in which workers and their organizations are integral to the decision making of organizations. Leaders take no satisfaction in caprice and find ways to assist workers instead of eliminating them, realizing that failure is an opportunity to grow, not an excuse to terminate. With data maintained of suitable employment and the coordination available for its implementation, missteps and failures could be translated into improved opportunities rather than dismissals and rejections. Workers will always want to change jobs for numerous reasons but instead of quitting and seeking, they should be provided the means of shifting and adjusting with fresh horizons percolating from active data made available to everyone and administered with equanimity. Relocation costs should be a shared responsibility instead of a burden dumped entirely on the shoulders of workers. Thus, movement among jobs would be coordinated and ensured.

If these measures seem excessively idealistic on one hand or insufficient on the other, consider how much better they are than the present reliance on inconsistent, unpredictable and sometimes malicious managers backed by laws that favor private greed over public interest. Consider, too, a more distant future characterized by the benefits of universal basic income that is unrealistic to expect in the near term. We desperately need changes that can be implemented soon because termination of employment is aimed by management at workers but hits the public as well and eventually wounds organizations themselves.

*Note: The key to labor success in dealing with management is unity. Labor is almost as notoriously fragmented as progressives and liberals, not to mention the public. Sowing disunity among every other group while achieving remarkable solidarity among themselves is the chief and most disastrous accomplishment of management.

in the public domain by Michael Driver

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Michael Driver is the author of Leadership vs. Management available almost for free on Amazon.

Michael Driver is also a playwright. A two-act play, Busy Bunz is available on Medium.