Re: Layoffs for Tax Avoidance

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The more people reporting to you, the more important you are to the company....well in theory.

I haven't witnessed much hiring of poor quality engineers, but I have witnessed the promotion of brown nosers, which of course is how all that deadwood moves to the top.

Nah, better to contract if you can do it. You get paid more than the boss.

In article , snipped-for-privacy@sushi.com says...>=20

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It's a pretty poor practice, though that doesn't stop the clueless. =20 Layoffs are hard on everyone, including management. Right before=20 major holidays is even harder. At my PPoE they specifically=20 avoided December and usually "got it over" by the end of October. =20 If layoffs are required there is usually plenty of warning.

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Shouldn't need a layoff to get rid of the truly incompetent.

More important than theory, in paycheck.

I've seen both, though far fewer of the former than the latter. =20 Beware of the 6'6" new hire who joins the boss' basketball team. =20

BTDT. Not worth the additional money.

-- Keith

The way the system is setup, it's a lot less riskier (meaning cheaper overall) to just lay someone off if they're incompetent rather than fire them for cause.

At least that's what I've been told. Clearly some people (like... say... Jim :-) ) would fire people with cause when deserved and fight as much as necessary in court to make it stick regardless of the cost, but it's pretty much unheard of at larger companies to be fired for cause unless it's some "interpersonal relationship" problem (e.g., sexual harassment, bringing an AK-47 to work, outright theft, etc.) -- the HR departments are just looking at their financial bottom lines, and layouts are (purportedly) cheaper.

---Joel

In article , snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com says...>

Cause? Do you live in a commie state that requires "cause"? Is incompetence not cause?

"Court", "stick"? You *must* live in a commie country.

Layoffs are *not* cheap, any way you want to cut it.

If you terminate someone with cause ("fired"), they don't get unemployment benefits for quite awhile (and they're pretty low). If you terminate them without cause ("layed off"), then get unemployment benefits after something like two weeks.

Possibly not: Unless you can prove that the person held themselves out to have skills that, in actuality, they didn't (the classic faked resume), it can be very difficult to demonstrate someone is actually incompetent. For instance, you probably can't claim that your millwright is incompetent if the task he failed to perform adequately was to design a web page.

In industries where being fired is not uncommon, HR departments end up creating a LOT of extra paperwork to document all the "counseling" sessions an employee has had, where they've been told exactly what job requirement they're missing, how they need to improve, etc. You do see this in, e.g., sales where it's easy to document whether people are making their quotas or not, and the job is simple enough that there aren't too much extenuating circumstances that could instead be blamed for poor performance.

The bottom line is that firing an employee with cause often results in the company being sued by the employee. Regardless of whether or not the lawsuit has a lot of merit (and it only needs the tiniest bit to be considered non-frivolous), it quickly gets expensive to hire a lawyer, defend your company in court, etc., so many companies just "roll over" and lay people off even when there is good cause.

In some industries they're actually just a part of a pretty normal business cycle... for instance, I believe that for quite awhile Boeing had pretty predictable, annual layoffs. Everyone knew they were coming well in advance, and they were almost regular enough that you could start planning your vacations around them. The next quarter, it was pretty much a given that almost everyone would be re-hired for their old position (and generally you'd know well in advance if that wasn't going to happen).

---Joel

Responding to myself here...

...this reasoning is actually the start of why project managers who have large projects fail are often viewed in a somewhat positive light, whereas those who have simple project fail are not: People are willing to give others the benefit of the doubt, and figure that for a large project, if must have been the complexity/extenuating factors of the project itself that caused it to fail, rather than poor management.

Of course, in most scenarios I think it *is* poor management, but of course then we're back to it being very difficult (particularly for non-technical people) to evaluate where -- if anyhwere -- the incompetence really lies.

---Joel

Nope. If you're laid off you collect unemployment immediately (the first week without a check, payroll or severance). No difference.

If his job is to design a web page and he can't, fire him. That's your right as an employer, unless of course you live in a weenie state or have a union running your company.

That's their issue.

Hell, you can sue for anything. Unless you live in a pinko state they'll never collect. Documentation makes the lawyers happy though.

How does the fact that they're common make them any cheaper?

Hi Keith,

Thanks for the clarification; I apparently was thinking of how long it normally takes to *receive* your first unemployment check.

My point was that you'd have a hard time convincing an unemployment benefits adjudicator that, if the millwright never held himself out as additionally having web design skills, he doesn't deserve benefits. I mean, if that were the case, to fire someone "with cause," you'd just have to ask them to do something completely out of their (claimed) skill range, e.g., ask Jim Thompson to run a bed and breakfast that specifically catered to leftist liberal weenies, and then fire him with cause when customers complained that he didn't seem to be a particularly accomodating host. :-)

It's your right to fire people with cause... and it's the employee's right to challenge it, and a state-assigned adjudicator gets to decide if there was cause or not.

Sorry, my not-so-obvious point was that, despite the costs of layoffs, in some industries routine layoffs are (apparently) cheaper than not having them. Granted, this isn't quite the same as suggesting that layoffs are "cheap."

---Joel

Jim would run a 'Leftist Weenie Roach motel.' 'Leftist weenies check in, but they don't check out!'

Hmm... would you feel this way if laying off employees did *not* increase your unemploment insurance rates?

If there's some "perk" you're giving your employees such as tuition reimbursement or other formal training, it's common to have an agreement that some amount of the value of that perk needs to be re-paid if the employee quits before such-and-such a date.

Cheers! Rich

It's crazy to charge employers for unemployment insurance at all. We should get a medal for every man-year of jobs we create. And the realtionship between employers and employees should be symmetric, a purely voluntary arrangement on both parts.

California has been described as "a fine-tuned job exporting machine" but that applies to the US, too.

John

You'd have my vote if you wanted to shift the cost of unemployment insurance to the general tax fund or somesuch. If we're going to pay for public health care from the general fund, getting unemployment insurance from it seems reasonable as well.

Nevada is still the fastest growing state out there... I would imagine a lot of the newcomers moved from California...

We have friends that made magabucks off the dot.com thing and moved to Vegas for tax reasons. Being bored, they started brokering slot machines. They're moving about 4000 a month now, buying and shipping all over the world.

John

In article , snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com says...>

I wouldn't even mind a co-payment by the employee, with the amount (both from the employer and employee) based on collection history. You know, that "insurance" sort of thing.

Yes, and it's going to get far worse.

I moved from Vermont, which is even worse.

The concept of having savings to ride you through days of unemployment are long gone, replaced by "screw the savings, I HAVE to have that big screen TV NOW! Guvment will pay my mortgage"