There are layoffs at my husband’s job. It’s a very large company, and consequently there are large layoffs. Several universities in Illinois, including mine, are laying off people. We all know that “being fired” is baked into the concept of “having a job.” Who hasn’t been fired at least once? I have, including for being “too pretty” but that’s a story for another time.
During COVID, many people lost their jobs, businesses and livelihoods. My sister lost her business a week after her husband lost his job. They have two small children, and this simultaneous job loss was not enjoyable for them.
Just yesterday people at N’s job gathered to say goodbye to an engineer who’s been with the company for 18 years and got fired this week. It’s very sad, I’m very sad but there’s no drama on social media over that firing or any other firing that isn’t of these government workers.
The reason I’m saying all this is that this incessant drama over some firings but not others unnecessarily hurts people’s feelings. It’s like we have two castes, those who should be exposed to the vagaries of fate and those who should be immune.
I’m just not sure what it is we should be collectively opposing here. The idea of losing one’s job? The reality in which all jobs aren’t for life? We don’t want to live in that reality, that’s for sure. Is it that good bosses left, bad bosses came and started firing? But again, this happens constantly. The layoffs at N’s job are because the company was recently acquired and new bosses do things differently. The firings at my job gave the same genealogy. Both N and I, at the very least, provide not less value than a regular government worker. N works in cancer research, in case people don’t know. I teach kids from East St Louis and Chicago Southside. And I don’t propose that there should be national outrage over our jobs. What’s happening is unpleasant but in a mundane, not “stop the presses” kind of way.
The reason why I’m going on about this isn’t so much the tweet at the top but that I found the same approach in people I know in real life. “Yeah, it sucks that you are getting fired but wait till you hear what’s happening to Jessica. She’s actually afraid for her job! Can you imagine? Isn’t that wrong?” Jessica is 28 and childless, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why her plight is so much worse than mine. I’m not minimizing Jessica’s discomfort. This sucks for both of us. But it doesn’t suck more for her than for me.
I hope nobody says that it sucks more for Jessica than for me because her firing is politically motivated. I explained at length yesterday that mine is, as well. Every side engages in politically motivated firings. Unpleasant, but as I said, not in “the sky is falling manner”.
Clarissa's Blog 
“It’s like we have two castes, those who should be exposed to the vagaries of fate and those who should be immune.”
I think this is exactly how @danzu72 and people like him conceptualise the whole thing. There’s them – those who are “on the right side of history”, are compassionate and loving and really good people – and then there’s everybody else: the great unwashed, the “basket of deplorables”, MAGA people, Trumpists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, sexist pigs and other undesirable types who deserve to be punched in the face. So, if they’re so good why are bad things happening to them now? They shouldn’t, and it’s all Trump’s/the government’s/MAGA people’s fault.
The fact that their jobs were unnecessary in the first place and had been created as a giant scamming gig by their side – the whole DEI/Woke/NGO system that is thankfully being dismantled – never occurs to them, or even the fact that in most countries most jobs are not for life; the cognitive dissonance is enormous.
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It’s got to the point that people are so steeped in the narratu, they’ll tell you to your face that your job loss is not as bad as somebody else’s. I, on the other hand, don’t suggest that mine is worse. I only want equality. It sucks to lose your job. For everybody it sucks. Nobody is more sacred than anybody else.
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Avi
“The fact that their jobs were unnecessary in the first place and had been created as a giant scamming gig…”
Agreed, but it goes all the way back to Affirmative Action, Quotas, and Set Asides beginning in the 80’s, those extra special applicants have been promoted to super extra special managers. Surely the world would end if you let any of them go ;-D
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Food poisoning is no joke. We can all start barfing at any point here, then what will we say?
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Clinton fired something like 300k-400k people from what I’ve read. However, he want through congress to get bi-partisan support to do it. Following a process that took longer and followed more carefully considered criteria.
Elon on the other hand is an unelected and deeply disliked person by a large portion of the population. He’s firing people without much care, often requiring the people be hired back due to a lack of care and understanding. This current approach is haphazard, chaotic, and to many people lacking in empathy to the people who will lose their jobs.
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All I see is empathy. My own union is exhibiting more empathy towards these bureaucrats than towards the actual membership of the union. They are getting together to phone bank and all. Nobody is phone banking for the dues-paying members of the union. Including the dues-paying members themselves.
But now that somebody explained this is because people see these bureaucrats as standing between them and illness, I get it. We could have saved ourselves this whole discussion if somebody said that from the start.
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Deeply disliked by whom?
I mean, I think he’s creepy, but I have no objection to him firing people, and in my neck of the woods he’s basically a superhero right now. For exposing fraud and waste, and firing people.
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@ed
While I agree with you that a bi-partisan, Congress-approved process would have been the better option – although more time-consuming and more difficult – I challenge your assertion that Elon Musk is “firing people”.
Mr Musk enjoys no executive powers as DOGE honcho, and has no authority to fire anyone in government service or employment, nor does it claim to. DOGE is simply doing its job – at Mr Musk’s behest, for sure – which is to identify areas of waste and mismanagement in public administration and the federal civil service. Once those areas are highlighted, it is other people’s job to decide what to do with that information, people who are indeed endowed with the executive power to dismiss employees, all the while following due process, I hope.
I also wonder whether in President Clinton’s time the situation was as dire as it currently seems to be, with regard to the huge amounts of funds disbursed in such a wasteful and corrupt way as to defy common sense, not to speak of the volume of taxpayers’ money which is simply unaccounted for. Did Mr Clinton’s administration have to face mismanagement of such proportions?
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I have to say I was shocked when I talked to a Secret Service guy on Zoom recently and he was clearly at home with someone hovering in the background. I felt very uncomfortable discussing the matter for which I was summoned in such a setting. This didn’t look like government or evoke any respect on my part. Also, I was speaking from my office. Why couldn’t the Secret Service guy speak from his?
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Really, really wish they could muster some self-awareness.
Before this last election, I think, truly, that we were on a lightly-greased downhill slide toward civil war. Recent turn of events… I don’t know if we’ve stopped that possibility, but it feels less likely. Pressure valves got opened, things don’t feel so dangerous, tightly-wound.
These people don’t understand that getting fired now, maybe saved them from whatever modern equivalent there is to the guillotine, in five or ten years: that’s where we were headed, if nothing changed. They need to thank their lucky stars, rethink their job options, figure out what they can do that’s useful, and maybe try accepting the job-market reality that everybody else has been living with for decades.
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I agree with this comment. I don’t think the people in question fully realize the amount of rage there is over how they acted during COVID. They retreated into their Zoom meetings while everybody else’s lives were collapsing. They mocked and lectured while people who couldn’t hide behind Zoom saw their lives falling apart.
I’m not one of the people who experienced anything negative during COVID but I know the pain is real and I respect it.
I respect the suffering of the fired government workers, too, but I don’t see it as bigger than anybody else’s.
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I don’t think even COVID, work-from-home jobs, and the amazing job security of govt. employees would even have been a real problem, if they had just had the sense to *not advertise* their amazing privilege all over the internet.
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And it’s not just advertising. It’s the smug hectoring of people who simply didn’t have a chance to “stay home save lives” or “avoid murdering grandma.” It’s the patrician snickering at those who had to go out and deliver their food and do everything to make the lifestyle of sitting at home in pijamas and baking bread.
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Yes, and they did it while proclaiming to the heavens that working-class white men were simultaneously the sh*ttiest *and* most privileged people on earth.
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Can you say a few words about how jobs, hiring, firing worked under socialism?
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Of course, that’s a great question and I’ll answer in a separate post. Thank you for the suggestion.
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People don’t understand this because they don’t work in the public sector and aren’t aware of the magnitude of the grift. During COVID, it sometimes took weeks to get a worker to answer an urgent email. I was in the office every day while people couldn’t be bothered to read emails.
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