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Special Report
Close the Door, Please
According to the Labor Department, the economy lost 651,000 jobs in February as unemployment crossed the 8 percent mark, the highest since 1983. Amid all the debate about economic policy, the only consensus seems to be that things are going to get worse before they get better.
So it's not surprising that the relatively elemental question, "How should you fire someone?", became the subject of a web column in the New York Times. It's a perfect match of topic and venue: supervisors and managers are getting lots of experience answering that question these days, and the Times never met a simple problem it couldn't complicate.
As with so much writing today of a counseling nature, one is alternately touched by the idea that people are thinking about how to treat one another better and dumbfounded at how mind-numbingly obvious the advice tends to be. That's because while firing someone is hardly more complex, at least in human (as opposed to legal) terms, than it was several generations ago, our attitudes toward it have become engulfed in theories about stress and psychological trauma. Accordingly, the Times column dispenses advice from "experts" who talk about the event in language not immediately distinguishable from the well-known stages of grief: "Be honest…Listen…Let them vent, if they must…Let them experience the whole range of emotions…Consider those who are left."
Unemployment does produce its share of horrific stories -- in January, a couple killed themselves and their five young children after losing their jobs at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in West Los Angeles -- so such concerns can't be dismissed. And our culture in general has been transformed by the ever-lurking specter of the lone gunman bearing a grievance or a deranging sorrow. The therapeutic model for handling difficult events is deeply embedded in the culture by now, and those of us who find its methodologies oppressive have learned to live with them. Besides, the old days were no bargain. Getting fired in 2009, even in this climate, sure beats getting fired in 1929.
Certainly losing a job at any time is not pleasant, especially if one has dependents. For people at certain stages of their lives, it can be the hinge point pushing them over the edge into despair, up to and including the suicides that make the news. The American notion of pulling oneself up from the bootstraps doesn't always work with Newtonian reliability. Sometimes people feel they've run out of slack.
Still, other than being extra vigilant about employees who may have emotional problems or are in such difficult personal straits that breaking the news warrants some kind of special care, there really isn't much one can do beyond using his common sense and professional discretion and extending whatever personal decency he may possess. It's best to be somewhat British about it on both sides and maintain one's dignity.
When I lost a job seven years ago, I was grateful for how British the whole process was. That's because it was a British company, though my supervisor was American. He called me into his office and said with impressive economy, "Close the door, please," and I knew I was cooked. We went through the formalities, he gave me information on Cobra and unemployment benefits, and we shook hands. He made no attempt to acknowledge my feelings or project what they might be, which I appreciated, since they were mine. I didn't care much for the job and had expected the ax to fall for some time, as layoffs had been ongoing. I didn't have a family yet. So my experience was easier than most.
Still, even for the hardest cases, it's important to maintain some perspective. Losing a job really isn't like death; only death is. (Or as Bob Dylan put it more enigmatically: "There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all.") Most of us will find some way forward. Wrapping a merely difficult event in therapeutic trappings patronizes the individual and reduces him to a stock character in a trauma that always has the same script. Now that, I'd think, might set somebody off.
As one might expect, the Times column is geared toward those who work in office settings, pitched to a readership already expert in tiptoeing around social life's ever-proliferating minefields. Yet even to such a self-conscious audience, the column feels compelled to dispense obvious advice like this: "Treating the person you are firing with respect is simple human courtesy." So obvious, you wonder why people need to be told.
Probably they don't; those stunning job-loss numbers tell us how many Americans are getting bad news these days, but they also indicate that layoffs and firings seem to be proceeding in orderly, if painful, fashion. At least by our standards on this side of the pond, Americans are keeping a stiff upper lip. As the British know, or once knew, stoicism can be a therapy of its own.
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Robert Rosencrans| 3.16.09 @ 7:57AM
Perhaps the Times article was a clever way of preparing it's own employees for departure, since their financial troubles have also become the subject of several news articles.
In the meantime, what has caused this great level of sensitivity, where the average citizen can't handle failure, albeit temporary?
Could it be 40 years of the tentacles of the Great Society, where citizens needs and wants were met by government largess, not personal responsibility?
Is it possible that the concept of personal responsibility has been destroyed by 45 years of unrelenting liberalism in every area, in particular the work force?
Minorities and women are told they will not be allowed to fail, and white males in the work force find themselves in frustrating positions. If they are promoted, a lawsuit may erupt, if not, they may leave that organization and try to find opportunities in other organizations until they are driven mad by roadblocks thrown up by alleged equal opportunity laws.
The real culprit in this entire saga may once again be the end game of well intentioned but moronic government intervention in the free markets.
Appleby| 3.16.09 @ 9:50AM
This is only an extension of the tidal wave of "grief counselors" who wash up at schools where some disgruntled Goth or disgusted victim of three years of bullying finally opens fire, right behind the cops and the forensic team. Kiddies have been taught (indoctrinated) that only the government is capable of easing their pain and only a shrieking, flailing, hysterical demonstration, followed by piling up teddy bears and other assorted debris at the site of the slaughter will assuage their suffering (and get them a front page photo on the NYT and a slot on the nightly news that might make it to YouTube).
When I was in school, the polio epidemic was raging right along with diptheria, typhoid, TB, scarlet and rheumatic fever, and such accidents as kids getting their hands and arms caught in ironing mangles and farm machinery, as well as the usual car accidents (no seat belts, air bags, or space capsule car seats in those days) and falling through the ice type things. Almost everybody had a sister or brother who died or was crippled for life by one of these accidents or diseases. The other kids expressed our sorrow in kid fashion and then the subject was dropped. The parents might invite the classmates to the funeral, and if your parents allowed it you went, quietly and soberly, and came home and got on with your life. Kids learned early that Mr. Death leaned on his sickle outside every building and playground and park where people gathered, and took him into account and paid him no mind. And when they went off to war, five thousand of them died in twenty minutes during D-Day and their siblings, parents, and classmates responded the same way: they sucked it up and realized that in the long run we are all dead and for the rest of us life goes on.
Today every time a soldier is killed, the kids respond the way they were conditioned by the hatchery where they spend most of their time -- by screaming, crying, thrashing and flailing and incidentally demanding that we cut and run, because all these deaths are so fatiguing and disruptive and we're running out of grief counselors.
So why not expect the same response from employees you have fired? It's what they have been conditioned to do since they were in pre-school: to be deny there is any such thing as failure and to be terrified of the natural processes of life.
As ye sow, shall ye reap. That's still the law.
Stan Redmond| 3.16.09 @ 11:40AM
Everytime I have been fired I have moved on to greater opportunities and made more money. Somedays wish I would get fired....But I'm self employed.
FARC| 3.16.09 @ 12:21PM
The amount of time and money people have to invest now to have a shot at the career they want is staggering. It's the curse of our increasingly specialized society, and the result is that a bad guess or bad break means 6 years and tens of thousands of dollars wasted. Makes it harder to pick up the pieces than it used to be.
Appleby| 3.17.09 @ 10:36AM
FARC, it only does that if your career choice is unrealistic (NBA Superstar, International Network Anchorperson, MBA, Queen of England, etc.) or slated to vanish before you get to it (look at all the people who spent four years taking Computer Science and came out of university with thousands of dollars of debt and a degree in COBOL and FORTRAN, both of which were obsolete by then).
You shouldn't gamble money you can't afford to lose. That's still the law.
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