Why Should It Be Easy to Fire Someone?

[Hannah Bell]

I should have sworn off this stuff for the summer, but I was reading the eight gazillionth article on why it's just.so.hard to fire teachers and I got steamed even without a rolling blackout coming through my 'hood and annihilating my a/c. And I got to thinking: Why, really, should it be easy to fire someone? Anyone? Outside immediate threats to people's lives and/or mental and physical health, why should anyone, in any job, be able to be fired instantly? Stop fantasizing about doing it to Joel Klein and think about this for a second.

I've wished, fleetingly, to see a few people fired in my lifetime (I'm looking at you, MTA token booth clerk who yelled at me when a MetroCard machine was defective! And you, JetBlue gate agent who lost THREE separate reservations! but never mind), but I guess I was too much of a softie to really demand it. Oh, maybe those people still "deserve" to be fired; I'll never know because if I ever see that gate agent again I'll run screaming, but NEVER MIND. My POINT (and I do have one!) is that I'm wondering why so many people seem to love the idea of firing "bad" teachers so fast it would make their heads spin.

Again, I'm not talking about teachers who grossly misconduct themselves. No one here is saying that the teacher who poses a threat to their students' well-being ought not to be promptly removed. But teachers can make well-intentioned mistakes; even worse, teachers can do everything right and still end up with unfavorable results (i.e. test scores)...

So why should it be easy to fire anyone, from a grocery store clerk to a rocket scientist or anyone in between? Why is this country so in love with the idea of at-will employment when it's clearly a good deal for those in power and not so good for most everyone else? Do we fantasize that one day we'll be filling out the pink slips? Or is it good old schadenfreude popping up again? Don't most people deserve time to grow and learn? Are most mistakes so life- or business-threatening that they can't be used as teachable moments? Is there always someone better out there ready to take the place of the washed-up screwup? Or is today's bright young thing just tomorrow's washed-up screwup...?

http://nyceducator.com/2010/07/why-should-it-be-easy-to-fire-someone.html

[dkf]

1. What if you don't have the money to pay them?

I thought most jobs are created by small businesses?

[JI7]

3. that's usually called being laid off

[Smarmie Doofus]

2. I tried to fire Bloomberg last year and he changed the friggin' City Charter....

... that's our NYC "Constitution" if you will .... and then spent $ 100,000,000 ( one hundred million dollars) to hang on .

[SB37]

4. I've got no problem with it...

There are three levels at my business: verbal warning, written warning, fired. With each one of the warnings comes some plan to get things back in line. If the employee can't get his act together, he's gone. I think that's a pretty fair system.

I don't know what happens with teachers, but I understand it's considerably more involved than that. Personally, I don't see why it should be.

[stray cat]

5. Do you marry someone for life after an interview? Yet divorce is easier than firing someone

In many jobs

[a la izquierda]

6. My husband...

was "let go" from his job back in March. A little background information, before inevitably some of you jump to conclusions and suggest he sucked at his job: the owner of the dog boarding facility where my husband worked really should have opened a car wash. She never should work with living things. This was a woman who would show up 8 hours a week, tops, yet did not want to hire a manager to take care of the place. My husband often worked 12 days without a day off, and when OKC had an enormous, state-shutdown type of blizzard, he was the one who drove 15 miles to work. When he got there, he called the other workers and told them not to drive in. The owner has an SUV. We have a beat-up old car. He worked weekends, he suggested ways to get new customers. He had clients write *in their wills* that he was to get their beloved dogs should they die. He had clients say they would stop coming if he left. By February he tried to quit and she kept him at work for an hour begging him to stay. She then gave him a raise. In March, he gave his 6 weeks notice. 6 WEEKS! She did not know what he was going to do. Two days after he put in his notice, she "let him go." But she didn't have the guts to do it, she had her brand new manager do it. Oklahoma is a place where employees have no recourse whatever, and when his unemployment paperwork went across her desk, that evil, selfish woman denied to sign off on it, saying he voluntarily quit. That is technically true, but he didn't voluntarily quit for 6 weeks. He finally got a new job, but we spent more than $3000 in my savings trying to stay afloat. And he still has no insurance, yet needs laser surgery to restore sight in his right eye.