I disagree, and think you're missing the forest for the trees. I think that people have an obligation to keep their promises to other people - that's a virtue called honesty or integrity. When a promise needs to be broken, that presents an ethical dilemma.
One example of people making a promise is hiring. A layoff is fundamentally breaking the promise you made to a group of people to keep them employed - whether that's the most ethical choice or not circles back to the trolley problem. If 20% need to be laid off to save the 80% then it's not an unethical choice. If 20% need to be laid off to make up for the mistake of a small group of leaders in order to benefit the small group of shareholders, then it's unethical.
> All objections stem from this, and it is controversial.
It's only controversial when you pretend that you can absolve an unethical choice by placing it behind the corporate veil. It's not controversial outside of Milton Friedman disciples.
Huh? A promise to keep people employed? If it's not in the contract, it hasn't been promised. You're fan-fictioning a promise that was never made to manufacture an ethical issue that's not actually real.
If the contract says you'll get 60 days notice and you don't, that is a broken promise (and an actionable breach of contract). Firing someone you hired is not a broken promise. You don't have to be a Milton Friedman disciple to refrain from gaslighting about employment being a promise to keep people employed forever.
It's called the "social contract". You do good work and make me money, I keep you around and let you keep doing good work. It's equally a cynical and fair interpretation of a company.
This was broken long ago, so I understand it being a foreign concept, but it's something my grandparents told me about when giving me my bootstraps to pick myself up with. Now it doesn't matter how much you make them because you can't outpay their ability to save on tax breaks or make funny monopoly number go up. So we're all doomed.
>Firing someone you hired is not a broken promise.
depends on the contract and laws around it. This is far from universal unlike the social contract described above.
> It's called the "social contract". You do good work and make me money, I keep you around and let you keep doing good work. It's equally a cynical and fair interpretation of a company.
If it's more profitable not to fire someone, because they're making the company money on net — given a big picture perspective — then they don't get laid off. There's no profit in laying off workers who are making the company more than they cost.
Where workers often miss perspective on this is in looking only at the smaller picture. Things can be making money in the small picture while not being profitable in the big picture, e.g. Kodak's film production operations before the rise of digital photography. If the business needs to be building digital cameras and the capital needed to do that is currently tied up in traditional film, the fact that employees working on film production may be profitable on net given the current capital allocation doesn't mean they're profitable in the big picture. And it's often a very, very good thing for society when a company in that position lays off a bunch of people and reallocates that capital, as it would have been with Kodak had they fully committed to digital earlier.
>There's no profit in laying off workers who are making the company more than they cost.
Yeah there are. If a worker is paid $100k, makes 1M for the company, but you have a 20M dollar tax incentive to bring people back to office: it doesn't matter if that worker is a 10x-er. It is more profitable to tank your productivity so you get a cushy tax break if that worker can't/doesn't want to RTO.
That was my core point on this "social contract" being broken. Companies are more interested in finding loopholes to save money than ways to make their products more attractive and grow other revenue sectors. There are a dozen more examples of this. It's not that they aren't productive, it's that the company found non-labor ways to make or save money.
>Where workers often miss perspective on this is in looking only at the smaller picture. Things can be making money in the small picture while not being profitable in the big picture,
And it's where companies miss when they look at next quarters earnings call instead of years later. Boieng is reaping it's rewards from over a decade of doing this. You can't screw over your employees and degrade quality to a point of costing lives and then suddenly wonder where it all went wrong.
why do you think these people are making the company money? The CEO and stockholders all seem to think the company will make more money without them then with them?
Do you think hiring is a promise?
What do you think the promise consists of? I think you are projecting a promise where you want one to be, but nobody is actually under the impression it exists.
Neither employers and employees are under the impression jobs are for life. If you're concern is primarily honesty and promise, would this piece satisfied by a written declaration and acknowledgment that the duration of employment is not indefinite and can change based on the arbitrary whims of the employer?
If you remove the corporate veil, what do you think the promise is for one human hiring another, and the ethical requirements. If I hire a housekeeper or babysitter, what am I committing to?
I dont see how corporations are held to anything but a higher expectation than individuals, not lower. Can you expand on this?
One example of people making a promise is hiring. A layoff is fundamentally breaking the promise you made to a group of people to keep them employed - whether that's the most ethical choice or not circles back to the trolley problem. If 20% need to be laid off to save the 80% then it's not an unethical choice. If 20% need to be laid off to make up for the mistake of a small group of leaders in order to benefit the small group of shareholders, then it's unethical.
> All objections stem from this, and it is controversial.
It's only controversial when you pretend that you can absolve an unethical choice by placing it behind the corporate veil. It's not controversial outside of Milton Friedman disciples.