One of the great complaints of bosses and corporations is that they can’t fire people whenever they want to. Employee protections were one of the great victories of the 20th century and the union movement, though far more in Europe than in America, except in the Federal civil services.
But bosses do have a point: being able to get rid of employees without fuss isn’t unreasonable: they’re hired to do a job, and if you don’t like how they’re doing it, firing them makes sense.
At first glance the problem is that often such power is abused, in too many ways to recount.
But the real problem is that without a job, people suffer: they have less, they may wind up homeless, in the US they’re essentially cut off from medical care and so on.
In a society where you would have a decent life whether employed or not, it wouldn’t matter if at employment was “at-will.”
We still live in a surplus society. If we were to get rid of planned obsolesence, massively reduce pollution, and work hard at public services like frequent and reliable public transit, free post-secondary education and plenty of third place gathering spots, we could have even more of a surplus: or rather, use much less and stop destroying the environment, so that we would stay a surplus society. Making people work when what they do isn’t actually necessary, is a “bullshit job” or actually does great harm, like almost all of the financial industry, is stupid, and doesn’t increase human welfare.
So the compromise is guaranteeing everyone in society a good life: housing, transit, health care and recreation. Again, we can do this, we have the surplus, and if we got rid of 40% of work, well, we’d have a society which would actually produce more welfare, because that work is useless of harmful.
And in a guaranteed good life society, very few people are going to want to spend their lives figuring out how to serve ads better, or other nonsense. They will want meaningful work: work which is enjoyable or which makes the world a better place. They will tend to self-select for jobs which really do benefit others, especially if, at the same time, we cap wealth at something like 10x median, and income at 3x what’s guaranteed. (Which also means those who want wealth will have to improve the baseline guaranteed wealth.)
At that point, if bosses want to fire people at will, who cares? It doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s more likely that bosses who offer work that isn’t meaningful or enjoyable, or both, won’t be able to get workers.
And that, my friends, is what a good surplus society looks like.
You get what you support. If you like my writing, please SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE
Jessica
Great post. You know this, but worth mentioning that such a society would generate much extra surplus by eliminating socially toxic jobs (most of finance, most of current media, advertising), which tend to soak up a quite disproportionate share of the surplus.
Oh, backing off the James Bond villain like attempt to conquer the whole world would free up some resources too.
Oakchair
Making people work when what they do isn’t actually necessary, is a “bullshit job” or actually does great harm, like almost all of the financial industry, is stupid,
——–
For society at large it is bullshit, stupid and harmful, but a lot of people receive a lot of wealth, power and social status from that bullshit. A lot of people also depend on the income from it. To those people it isn’t bullshit it’s power, money and status and they’ll fight tooth and nail to keep it that way even if it means mass graves. They don’t have to fight very hard anymore because every social institution has been captured, and every person has been subjected to a lifetime of propaganda.
94% of medical interventions were not supported by high-quality evidence.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0895435622001007#!
Stop, and read that again. American spends almost 20% of it’s economy on medical interventions that lack quality evidence of benefit let alone evidence of safety. Include the insurance/banking industry (8%), the military industry (4%) the advertising industry (3%) and easily a third of our economy is “bullshit” work.
StewartM
Having worked in an at-will state and all my jobs being at-will, I’ve seen and experienced the ‘boss favoritism/boss persecution’ phenomenon. I’ve been in bad times and good myself; I had bosses I was sure were looking for an excuse to fire me and also bosses who said I was one of the best employees at doing my job my company had ever had (in the bad time, I was told much later that there were well-respected people who went to bat for me behind the scenes with management who defended me, which was probably what saved me). I’ve seen incompetents promoted to well-paid, prestigious, positions, and highly competent people persecuted out the door.
When I later had semi-supervisory roles, that was eye-opening. I found out that my reports never did get into similar trouble as I, mostly because I didn’t complain to upper management about their perceived failings but highlighted their accomplishments and praised what was good in them (everyone is a mixture of good and less-good, but I can say that everyone who reported to me had their own set of strong points, and I made sure that management knew that). They all made valuable contributions to the job even though they were good at different things, and you had to handle them differently. This taught me that one’s personal supervisor played a key point in how higher management perceived people.
However, I do note that sometimes you have a case where the ‘persecution’ may not be driven at the immediate supervisory level, but higher up the management food chain. It’s hard to protect an unfairly persecuted employee if that’s the case. The superior can override the good recommendations and evaluations given by lower tier managers with poorer ones.
Management pretends that their process is objective, but it’s far from it. The only thing I can say in its defense is that if you survive, the good times and bad times will probably cancel out. You will be separated from your persecuted by their leaving or being fired, your being transferred, or whatnot. However, that’s also true for your good times–even when others are saying what a great employee you are, a change in your management and a change your environment and you can become a ‘bum’ again. Even in your moment of triumphs, you should remember that “this will not last”.
But yeah, I’d say that my service in at-will state made me envious of work in the US government and elsewhere, where if you stayed inside a legally-defined ‘box’ of behaviors you couldn’t be threatened or touched.
Ian Welsh
When workers are in high demand, when a lot of management bullshit goes away. Think the dot-com era. If you were a programmer (I hate calling them “engineers”) you were nearly sacrosanct, and if someone fired you, you had a job again almost immediately.
I remember even in the 80s when it was like that for bad jobs. There were always help wanted signs on 7/11s, they could never get enough security guards, etc…
When people have better options than being treated like shit by bosses, well, bosses lose a lot of leverage and can even find themselves fired if they can’t retain employees.
Joan
I would love to live in a society like this!
NR
That study Oakchair linked to does not say what he claims it does.
Cochrane Reviews looks at more controversial and limited scope questions in medicine. They don’t evaluate questions which already have recent published meta-analyses into them, which is a lot of common interventions. “High quality evidence” when used by Cochrane researchers means a double-blinded trial without any issues. If a trial has, say, a high dropout rate or any design issues then it will be downgraded to “moderate” or “low” quality. Cochrane do not base their view about whether an intervention is effective or not solely on whether there is high quality evidence, there is a separate conclusion that rightly looks at the evidence as a whole that is not included in this paper.
A lot of research questions looked at are what you could call small questions, such as the use of a particular type of painkiller for pain caused by a certain condition. No one is going to spend loads of money running a large trial to address a minor question, nor is anyone going to spend it repeating every trial that had difficulties. Some questions are not possible to be evaluated by double-blinded trials and for some questions ethical approval for re-testing would never be given.
Looking at a random selection of Cochrane Reviews and seeing which ones found high vs medium quality evidence is a meaningless question. What questions were being evaluated in those reviews, what is their impact and are those questions for which you would reasonably expect large trials are the actual pertinent questions. The implication that most medical interventions lack decent evidence is completely false and a complete misunderstanding of the Cochrane review process. Most medical interventions won’t even by assessed by a Cochrane review and least of all the most serious and already well-studied topics that form the core of medical practice.
marku52
Ian’s comment is a great one. My wife points this out to me often “Back then (mid 70’s) I had tons of jobs. I’d lose one one day and have another one in a couple of days. It wasn’t a problem” And what a breadth of experience. She was a waitress (terrible at it, got fired), a photographers assistant, a computer data input person for an auto parts chain that was digitizing (She told the other workers “you know, they are only doing this so they can get rid of you”), and finally a paginator at a news paper using a brand new digital pagination system. All kinds of opportunities out there.
And for me, I got hired at a cabinet shop with nothing but some very basic woodworking skills, eventually became shop foreman, left to do electronic tech work at a sound company, boss even paid for another tech to come in once a week and train me. I went back to school and got my EE degree. (for $85 per quarter!)
Sure was a different time, and a way way better one.
Raad
Cochrane reviews are also just as politicised as anything, the people that run and make them are better at using the veneer of science to hide behind.
Example? Look at the mask question: they used all sorts of bullshit to make mask use look bad without actually looking at their dataset fairly and more importantly they didn’t point out that cloth masks became obsolete once omicron and the newer variants started showing up, or mentioning the efficacy of n95/ffp2 or ffp3 masks which are still quite effective because they filter air when fitted properly and checked or if your lucky, tested (on you that is).
Oakchair did not do anything wrong and it is certainly more than plausible to support his contention given that this is what the basic highlight from his linked study is (included since not including it is a very clever way to whine about something without making any substantial point):
“
In this large sample of 1,567 interventions studied within Cochrane reviews, effects of most interventions (94%) interventions were not supported by high-quality evidence.
•
Potential harms of healthcare interventions were measured more rarely than benefits.
•
Patients, doctors, and policy makers should consider the lack of high-quality evidence supporting the benefits and harms of many interventions in their decision-making.
“”
I’m sure those interested can actually read into it and get the same impression that anyone who has worked anything medical and kept one eye open can tell you: high amounts of it really is bullshit and ritual practice and questioning it will give you the same treatment that this guy got:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
Please don’t put doctors and other allied health professionals and what they do on a pedestal by suggesting that the scientific apparatus that supposedly supports modern medicine is somehow sacrosanct. They are all human and if anything the pandemic showed, with almost granular detail, how all these institutions dance to the elites when required to do so. Only a few fought back and even they now know the score.
The true revolutionary, regardless of field, inevitably has a habit of dying early and in shitty circumstances unless lucky enough to catch the eye of the powerful, in the good way and not the bad way.
....
I would argue we are already seeing this transpire. This latest generation doesn’t care how much you pay them for a shitty job, they don’t want to do it and won’t and aren’t doing it. You can’t pay them enough to do it.
Couple that with the elimination of many jobs through automation and if alternatives aren’t imagined and implemented, there are going to be a lot of idle people looking for trouble with nothing to lose akin to the French suburbs but on a massive worldwide scale where the majority of the planet’s human inhabitants are packed on top of each other in sprawling favelas.
Haiti and South Africa are the new norm and that’s not bottom. Not yet. It’s an informative destination on the way down.
Willy
As an exercise in personal curiosity, I did a rundown of every boss I ever had. I tried to keep my own interactions with them out of my equations. It turned out, only about a third of them seemed to deserve their positions, were those most skilled at getting the sum total most for the company payout least for their companies over the long term. A few did run borderline sweatshops but stayed clear of the “work that isn’t meaningful or enjoyable, or both, won’t be able to get workers” bit.
The other two thirds of poorer bosses ranged from absentee, to feckless screwup, to self-serving power player. It seemed that the very worst were the ones who were able to act with impunity. In those places they seemed to be benefitting from poor objective accountability systems.
I’m not sure if Graeber wrote about Bullshit Bosses. I bet that one would’ve sold.
Oakchair
Here is a list of a few Cochrane review topics
Effectiveness of:
Plaster casts for broken bones, flu vaccines, blood pressure drugs, chemotherapy, asprin, hand washing, cancer screening, antibiotics.
So the comment below:
“Cochrane Reviews looks at more controversial and limited scope questions in medicine”
Is a lie.
——
Here is a list of some of Cochrane reviews on topics with meta-analysis published within 5 years:
Effectiveness of:
Antidepressants, Antipsychotics , NSAID’s , Flu vaccines, Antileptic drugs, Statins,
So the below statement:
“They don’t evaluate questions which already have recent published meta-analyses”
Is a lie.
——
Here is how Cochrane lowers ratings from High to moderate:
“randomized trials begins with a high-certainty rating”
“Our confidence in an estimate of effect decreases if studies suffer from major limitations that are likely to result in a biased assessment”
When the studies as a WHOLE suffer from MAJOR problems that LIKELY result in bias they are downgraded.
So the comment below:
“High quality evidence when used by Cochrane researchers means a double-blinded trial without any issues.”
Is false.
—–
” for some questions ethical approval would never be given.”
—–
When powerful people say they can’t provide quality evidence their billion dollar medicine is helpful because doing the science is unethical that is a confession.
different clue
Having or starting a Shared Social Surplus Society Party would be a good thing.
As Oakchair notes, the Bullshit Profiteers will defend their Bullshit Society at any cost, including mass graves. If they themselves were all put in the mass graves, then that center of opposition to the Shared Social Surplus Society would be removed.
mago
As an owner and/or manager of food service businesses, e.g. restaurants and catering operations, I hired and fired.
Letting an employee go was seldom easy, as it required a one on one encounter along with the knowledge that you were hurting someone.
You and your baking suck babs. Of course it was never put like that even it was thought like that.
Back in the early 80’s Seattle culinary scene people in the trade knew about each other even if personal interaction was lacking.
The person who you fired could show up in another eatery and bad mouth you in an attempt to smear and slander, which usually backfired.
The dynamics are probably universal in whatever field one toils.
Ian’s vision is beautiful. There are many toxic ideologies and those who benefit from them to conquer.
Doubt I’ll live to see it.
NR
Oakchair is wrong. Cochrane’s handbook is posted publicly on their website and if you look at the chapter about quality of evidence, you can see in table 14.3.a, they give a clear example of a reason to downgrade evidence:
“Downgraded because of 10 randomized trials, five did not blind patients and caretakers.”
So Cochrane does, in fact, downgrade evidence that does not come from blinded trials.
https://training.cochrane.org/handbook/current/chapter-14
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/central/doi/10.1002/central/CN-01954216/full
Here’s an example of a plaster cast study from Cochrane: “Comparison of short and long arm plaster casts for displaced fractures in the distal third of the forearm in children (letter)”
So we have a study about a specific type of plaster cast, for a single specific type of fracture, in a specific group of people (children).
Very much a limited scope question, sorry.
This statement is completely ignorant. All medical studies have to pass ethical review. Sometimes the simple lack of treatment can do harm, and that harm outweighs any benefit from the study.
To take a simple example, a doctor stitching up a bleeding wound is a medical intervention. If you were to propose a randomized trial where half the people with bleeding wounds got them stitched up, and half got no treatment at all, so you could compare the outcomes of both groups, you would never get ethical approval for that study because a significant portion of the people you decided not to stitch up would bleed out and die. And that lack of ethical approval is certainly not evidence that medicine is not helpful.
StewartM
Willy
The other two thirds of poorer bosses ranged from absentee, to feckless screwup, to self-serving power player. It seemed that the very worst were the ones who were able to act with impunity. In those places they seemed to be benefitting from poor objective accountability systems.
From my job experience, what made working for the US government (even though I’d have taken a huge accrued benefit hit) attractive, where if you stayed within lines you couldn’t be persecuted of the job, was the ‘act with impunity bit’ in most private industry. By my experience, managers are like judges, they may see something being done wrongly or unfairly by another of their ilk, but they are very leery about stepping on the toes of the offender. So to undo the damage of a bad boss, a good boss replacing a bad boss has to construct a narrative of “What X [the bad boss] did was right then, but now we need to shift to something else now”. No manager can just come out and openly say “X was screwing things up” even when he/she transparently was.
(This even extends to one CEO replacing another, BTW).
I’ve had all of your categories too. The absentee boss isn’t too bad if your group is self-managing and has good people who cooperate easily; if it has prima donnas who overstep their boundaries or if the boss absolutely has take a step that no one else can take for a thing to get done, then it’s a problem. Often absentee or distant bosses are older employees just putting in the time before retiring.
Feckless screwups can be a problem, and from my experience it takes multiple screwups to get them out of management—and even then they’re usually not fired, but delegated to some high-paid desk job with no reports. During downsizing we often keep these high-paid failures and get rid of lower-level people who while maybe not ‘stars’ at their jobs, were still doing perfectly acceptable work, even though letting go one of these high-paid failures could mean we keep 2-3 lower-paid people doing real work.
(It used to be that people who were technically competent but promoted to become ‘feckless screwup’ managers could actually return to being technical people again–they could return to doing what they did well. But nowadays we select management candidates so early in their career (like 2-3 years, as opposed to 10 or so previously) that these desk-sitters really don’t have much in the way of technical skills either. Which makes keeping them even more perplexing).
The worst is the power-player. Often these are good at company politics too, of saying the ‘right things’, of following the latest CEO-endorsed corporate fad (one I had used to actually quote the then-current CEO at the start of meetings; it reminded for all the world of Soviet academia under Stalin where, say, a paper on biology would quote Stalin in the very first paragraph).
The worst is the power-player who also suffers from Dunning-Kruger, and is too conceited to admit he/she doesn’t know everything and is not open to contradictory points of view. These I think do the most damage, as they “sell” themselves the best, and are most motivated by ambition to enact their agenda. Moreover, like in our politics (say, Reagan) the real damage they do doesn’t become obvious until many years later after they are out).