Suck It: Unemployment by Email

One of the hidden downsides to the technological turn is that now cowardly bosses don't have to face the workforce they're forcibly ejecting from their professions. In fact, they don't have to face that this is what they're doing; it's "downsizing" or "budget crisis" or even, frighteningly, "modernizing." This is in no way a new phenomenon, but the explosion of digital media communications has only normalized this already dehumanizing and corporatizing trend. In much the same way that politicians have long been able to hide from public scrutiny via media exposure behind the mask of a press office, now employers at all levels can hide behind a new smoke-screen: the computer screen.

As if pink slips with your paycheck weren't impersonal enough, we now have eliminated the paychecks by turning them into automatic deposits--and then eliminated the pink-slips too by making the whole thing able to take place purely in digital interactions. First comes the mass email about budgetary woes. Then comes the complaints of policy changes and uncertainty, in the form of a deluge of emails, many incomprehensible. Next, a personal-seeming email expressing concern for your particular situation (insert your name here) arrives. Then it comes. Subject line: Budget Cuts.

The next week, you're erased from the payroll system. Your number--the only way you're recognizable to the entity you've worked for and depended on more than you'd like to admit begins grinding its slow and unpredictable way through the outsourced bureaucracy of COBRA--somewhere in Texas, or maybe Mumbai. Another email comes, reminding you to clear your office, or return your keys, or relinquish your parking pass, or some other impersonal-and-therefore-all-the-more-demeaning demand. You're now a detail to be cleared, a process to complete. You're deleted.

Economic strife and unemployment affect everybody. Job elimination is a reality for many employers, the virtuous and the wicked alike. Part of the reason that managers and administrators make the very good livings that they make (particularly relative to their staffs) is because they have the duty to handle these issues, the unpleasant task of keeping things running smoothly and on-budget. That includes handling staffing at all levels. When someone is let go, either for cause or for budget, notification is part of the duty of management. And when a job disappears for reasons that have nothing to do with the former employee, the bare minimum that employee deserves is an exit interview and the opportunity to hear directly from those for whom they worked directly the reasons for their termination.

Email hiring and firing allows those charged with hiring and firing to hide from the human faces of their decisions. It buys into the false and destructive metaphor that people are nothing more than raw materials, "human resources" to be squabbled over, claimed, mined, and then discarded--that there is no relationship there, no consciousness worthy of consideration or concern. It's dehumanizing, ultimately, to parties on both sides. By treating others as not worthy of human recognition, employers diminish their own humanity as well.

In other words: anyone who has ever terminated an employee by email should SUCK IT.