Do 'Layoffs By Email' Show What Employers Really Think of Their Workers?

When Google laid off 6% of its workforce — some of whom had worked for the company for decades — employees 'got the news in their inbox,' writes Gawker's founding editor in a scathing opinion piece in the New York Times:

That sting is becoming an all-too-common sensation. In the last few years, tens of thousands of people have been laid off by email at tech and digital media companies including Twitter, Amazon, Meta and Vox. The backlash from affected employees has been swift.... It's not just tech and media. Companies in a range of industries claim this is the only efficient way to do a lot of layoffs. Informing workers personally is too complicated, they say — and too risky, as people might use their access to internal systems to perform acts of sabotage. (These layoff emails are often sent to employees' personal email; by the time they check it, they've been locked out of all their employer's own platforms.)

As someone who's managed people in newsrooms and digital start-ups and has hired and fired people in various capacities for the last 21 years, I think this approach is not just cruel but unnecessary. It's reasonable to terminate access to company systems, but delivering the news with no personal human contact serves only one purpose: letting managers off the hook. It ensures they will not have to face the shock and devastation that people feel when they lose their livelihoods. It also ensures the managers won't have to weather any direct criticism about the poor leadership that brought everyone to that point.... Future hiring prospects will be reading all about it on Twitter or Glassdoor. In a tight labor market, a company's cruelty can leave a lasting stain on its reputation....

The expectation that an employee give at least two weeks notice and help with transition is rooted in a sense that workers owe their employers something more than just their labor: stability, continuity, maybe even gratitude for the compensation they've earned. But when it's the company that chooses to end the relationship, there is often no such requirement. The same people whose labor helped build the company get suddenly recoded as potential criminals who might steal anything that's not nailed down....

Approval of unions is already at 71 percent. Dehumanizing workers like this is accelerating the trend. Once unthinkable, unionization at large tech companies now seems all but inevitable. Treating employees as if they're disposable units who can simply be unsubscribed to ultimately endangers a company's own interests. It seems mistreated workers know their value, even if employers — as they are increasingly prone to demonstrate — do not.

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