James Fallows has Vichy-Democrat tendencies but this is good:
It’s the word fire. I have fired people, and I have been fired — and there is no comparison in how much more excruciating the former process is. I know, agree with, and have even written a book about all the reasons why “flexibility” in the labor force is a good thing for companies and for the overall economy. People need to be held accountable for good or bad performance. Economies need to be able to move from the old — old markets, technologies, regions, emphases — and open up to the new. Companies very often need to “right-size” to survive. We all understand these truths. They are part of America’s strength.
But people with any experience on either side of a firing know that, necessary as it might be, it is hard. Or it should be. It’s wrenching, it’s humiliating, it disrupts families, it creates shame and anger alike — notwithstanding the fact that often it absolutely has to happen. Anyone not troubled by the process — well, there is something wrong with that person. We might want such a person to do dirty work for us. (This might be the point where the Romney campaign wants to take another look at Up In The Air.) We might value him or her as a takeover specialist or at a private equity firm. But as someone we trust, as a leader? No – not any more than you can trust a military leader who is not deeply troubled when his troops are killed.
Here’s a test: If you were making the point about the need for competition, can you imagine yourself saying, “I like being able to fire people…” ?
freelancer
ADJ,
I would have gone with an ELO title, but good post.
Angry DougJ
@freelancer:
I should have done Smoke Of A Distant Fire.
Corner Stone
@freelancer:
What do you mean? Angry TrollJ block quoted James Fallows.
He didn’t actually post any original thought or analysis.
srv
Perry should just man up and say: “Fire people? I’ve KILLED people!”
Crowds would eat that up.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Fallows and TNC. The only reason to visit the Atlantic website.
Elie
I have fired and been fired. I second Fallows’ opinion about #2 — being fired. My experience with that is about 9 months ago. Have luckily found work again, but the pain of that experience — well, I would never wish it on anyone and do not even see why that comes up in a conversation about building work for people — building positive energy and getting our country back on track.
Romney has a weak connection between his mouth and his brain. Why? Because he is not empathetic enough that his brain helps him avoid certain statements… he has poor discernment and discretion but most of all, he lacks ultimately the emotional insight and maturity to “feel” what another might feel in a given situation. He is a clod
He does not belong anywhere near the Presidency. I pray and hope that will never come to pass. He is a loser with a hundred million dollar bank account.
freelancer
@Corner Stone:
Highlighting Fallows’ analysis makes for a good FP thread, in my opinion. It’s pretty goddamned scathing. But you’re not sated unless you’re being a hemmorhoidal malcontent, are you?
mad the swine
The former process?
Fuck you.
You’re looking at the terror and panic and shame and sense of dislocation that comes with suddenly having no livelihood, not knowing how – or whether – you’re going to pay for your mortgage and gas and utilities and even food, looking at, even in the best case, a long miserable struggle to get back to where you were… and comparing that to a brief spasm of emotional trauma?
Yeah, I’m sure when you pick up your paycheck and look at how your stock options have gone up in value thanks to that downsizing, you’re crying all the way to the bank.
Seriously. I stopped reading there, because fuck you.
dww44
As one who retired from a branch office of a national brokerage firm, I can only say that I grew extremely tired of hearing brokers applaud companies who announced layoffs in the thousands range, causing their stock price to immediately go straight up. There was always something just plain wrong about that, that the primary reason a company’s stock would go up was because it announced huge personnel cutbacks and that no matter what else it did, cutting people was the move most rewarded by the markets.
Then there was the personal experience I had as a manager of the low-level, back office adminsitrative types, that every time there was some big blip in the market and the company’s fortunes took a hit, the ONLY ones who EVER paid the price were those who could least afford it. I don’t even think that Fallows is deserving of the Vichy-Democrat label. There is far too little employee loyalty in our oh so vaunted capitalistic system.
lol
I got laid off a year ago and despite the fact that I knew I was going to land on my feet just fine (and ultimately did) , it was still an incredibly stressful process.
Corner Stone
@freelancer: Listen, you emopantshitting gadfly. Just say, “Thanks for linking.” next time.
Fucking douche.
LT
Fire Your Bank Day.
Ron Beasley
I have been fired, it was more often than not a relief. I have also fired people, in all but one case it was painful. When I was fired there were times I knew it was difficult for the person firing me but not always. There was one case where I was fired for refusing to do something that was illegal – that person fired me with glee but later spent some time in jail so I guess I got the last laugh.
Ira-NY
Fallows nailed it with a sledgehammer!
dww44
@Elie: Best description of candidate Romney that I’ve read to date. Thank you.
Darnell From LA
I will tell you this: as someone who has worked in middle management, and actually fired more people than I can remember, the words “I like to fire people” in ANY fucking context have never passed by lips. Period. I mean, really. How many people say they “fired” their cell phone company? Or “fired” their bank? That’s not the context that statement holds in Willard’s brain. (His “Brain Capital”. See what I did there?)
Nobody in the middle class talks like this. Mitt has eliminated more jobs than most middle class people have eaten eggs. And the words “I like to fire people” are obviously part of his lexicon. Deal with it. Fuck you, Willard.
Warren Terra
Clearly a post written by someone who’s only fired people retail. I’m sure once you fire people wholesale, it’s completely different.
In fact, I can share with you this touching closing passage of the memoir that Mitt’s tiny shred of humanity wrote with its last scrap of life:
mad the swine
Okay, fine, I went back and read the whole thing. And Fallows is completely wrong.
One, on a general level: Americans (by which I mean the contemptible majority) respect people who are willing to ‘make the hard choices’. Our Republican Party fell all over itself a few years ago to praise CIA torturers as heroes. Let me emphasize this: the acts of stripping, beating and waterboarding prisoners are seen as heroic. There is a strain of thought – and it is terribly contagious; Fallows indulges in it when he claims that firing people is harder than being fired – that moral courage means engaging in acts of necessary evil, and the more evil you do in a good cause, the more admirable you become.
It depends on the meaning of ‘like’. I enjoy firing people? No. I want the ability to make the best decisions for the company as a whole, including the ability to fire people at will? Most people support that. It’s how the free market works, The only people that this Romney clip is going to hurt are ones suspicious of capitalism already, and they wouldn’t be voting R anyway.
Darnell From LA
And yes, I am +3 for the night, and today Willard went from my “never voting for, going to give til it hurts to Obama to defeat” list, to my “fuck you, asshole, you elitist job killing, Gordon Gekko Wannabe prick” shit list.
Fuck you, Willard.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Warren Terra:
Indeed. When you’re firing them wholesale, someone else gets to do the dirty work of actually telling the poor saps that they’re being sacked.
jrg
@Elie: $250 million dollar bank account, much of it inherited.
Fuck him. My first job was at MCI, where I watched Bernie Ebbers wipe out the retirement of thousands of people who spent their lives building that company, then he laid them off.
Romney appears to have absolutely no clue what it’s like to live in the real world, where information asymmetry, white collar criminal shenanigans, and bad luck can cause almost anyone to lose everything. What a clueless, entitled prick.
Tom Q
OK, this may all pass quickly — Romney could win by 20 tomorrow, go down to SC and lap the field, and this could be forgotten (at least till Fall).
But some of the on-air reporters in NH are saying everywhere they go today, people are bringing this subject up. It’s a sentence that seems to sting people. And if it affects enough votes tomorrow…
…well, it’ll put Romney in an almost-surreal historic box with his father, who was running strong in the race for ’68, when one sentence — one word, really: “brainwashed” — just about ended his campaign.
Martin
Only sociopaths enjoy firing people. Normal people have empathy.
piratedan
for guys like Willard, they aren’t people, they’re just numbers. So he’s just a corporate Stalinist at heart.
Egg Berry
Aren’t there companies that will come in and fire people for you?
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: This.
Tom Q
@The prophet Nostradumbass: What’s the expression? One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
Egg Berry
@Tom Q: One
deathlayoff is a tragedy; a milliondeathslayoffs is astatisticchance to exercise stock options.I think that’s more fitting.
Steeplejack
@Elie:
Did I misread Fallows? I thought he said firing was tougher than being fired.
WTF?! I heartily disagree. After you have fired someone, you still have a job, money coming in and no potentially gigantic dent in your self-esteem.
Which is not to say that firing someone is not hard, but c’mon . . .
Cacti
That’s why I don’t buy the “out of context” argument.
Who, other than a privileged scion, gets a kick out of firing someone?
Maybe it makes his $50 steak taste better at lunch.
Lurker
@Martin:
I agree with you, but I remember the quality of “empathy” almost kept Sonia Sotomayor from the Supreme Court. Folks on TV kept tossing around the word “empathy” like it was a bad thing. :-(
Chuck Butcher
I’ve fired one person where I felt relief doing it, I couldn’t have been more done with somebody’s horseshit at that point. I have had to let other people go and I hated it. I didn’t hate it because it had to be done, I hated it because I knew they skated the edge and it was very bad for them and could send them over. I won’t pretend that my distress in any way matched what was happening to them, but I sure did hate doing it. And it didn’t matter if they needed to go or the economy forced it, bad stuff.
But this stuff was personal, these people weren’t IDs on time cards – they were right next to me. For POS like Mittens, it’s just numbers – theoretical, kinda like pink slips and unemployed.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@mad the swine: And the fact that Fallows has been through both didn’t enter into your assessment? He’s point is that it should be painful to fire people. The fact that Mitt feels nothing shows the gaping hole in his soul.
Elie
@Steeplejack:
I misread it but stick with my reality that BEING fired was horrible. Sucks to fire someone too — but again, why the fuck is “firing” even in his head as he campaigns across an America hurting for jobs? The dude is a dud
mainsailset
Though it’s a part of our American DNA to applaud capitalism it is quite another to suddenly recognize that we’re talking about bringing a VENTURE capitalist into our WH. That’s a whole other bird of prey.
Would his administration treat the US like a larger version of Staples. Yeah. Kinda think it would.
Dr. Loveless
For me, “I like being able to fire people,” is simply further proof that Willard Romney would fail the Voigt-Kampff test.
Suffern ACE
@mainsailset: Yeah. How did that PE rescue of Chrysler work out? And that investment in GMAC Bank (now known as ally bank), writer well over its fair share of problem mortgages? Private Equity is a relatively small industry, employing a good number of former pols. Its the type of industry I’d want to make decisions on government contracts.
piratedan
you know, in these times, it would be fitting to have a candidate actually say that it would be nice to have the power to “hire people” instead of firing them.
lol
@mad the swine:
There’s a difference between embracing someone who reluctantly makes the hard choices and someone who enjoys making them.
pseudonymous in nc
@Chuck Butcher:
And not knowing how the bills are going to be paid. And having student loans hanging over your head for 20 years. And pleading with health insurance companies to cover what they promised, as opposed to getting on the phone with their CEO and geting a phone drone summarily disembowelled.
smintheus
Knew somebody in college who I almost but never quite dated…seemed too hard-nosed, too careerist, too self-centered, and not especially friendly with the other students in that shared house. 30 years later I googled this old acquaintance thinking, probably, corporate lawyer. Oh yes, at a large firm. Specialty: advising clients about the best means to fire employees so as to strip them of any effective way to contest their firing. Phew.
Whatever kind of person looks forward, in youth, to a career of grinding other people’s careers into dust, is the kind of person I’ve never wanted to be too closely associated with.
Mark
Fallows is ridiculous. It is ten thousand fucking times worse to get fired or laid off. It usually comes as a shock, rarely comes with much in the way of severance, and leaves you with zero fucking time to figure out what the fuck you’re doing to do for money.
Despite the claims of people who do the firing, it is not heart-wrenching. When the people they let go – often, in the case of no cause layoffs, very capable people who were contributing but fell on the wrong side of some political battle – aren’t working three or six months later, they don’t exactly call to help out.
Not that I have much experience with firing people. I once let two carpenters go because they were fucking up on the job (one guy, on the rare occasions that he showed up when he said he would, was stoned and basically unable to work.) I have plenty of empathy, but I did not feel bad for very long when I told them my cousin and I were going to finish the job.
Sasha
I’ve never been fired nor have I ever been in a situation where I knew I could slide right into another job. If you’re Fallows and you live in his world and you know the right people and you know losing your job is just temporary maybe firing someone is worse than being fired.
It has been nearly thirty years but I still remember letting our cleaning lady go and how miserable it made us. We were just once-a-week clients and we knew she’d have no trouble replacing us but we put it off long after we really needed to let her go. Even now, I find it difficult to say we fired her.
Martin
@mainsailset:
That might be okay. Sell off the welfare states, keep everyone willing to pay enough taxes to cover costs. Are we really going to miss South Carolina and Alabama? I’ll miss Maine, but Canada will take good care of them.
CT Voter
Vapors! Mitt Romney’s words are being taken out of context EVEN BY JAMES FALLOWS.
I look forward to Ruth Marcus’ chiding everyone for this.
And the follow-up column about Christie’s “Someone’s going down tonight, sweetheart”. Because, of course, if a teenager in Kansas deserves an entire column about being a potty-mouth, then, for sure, the governor of New Jersey deserves at least two columns for being a complete asshole. Right?
Sasha
@Martin:
That reminded me of this:
Dear Red States…
We’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and
we’re taking the other Blue States with us. ..
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/80714812.html
Martin
@Mark:
Speak for yourself. I’ve fired people. Not layoff – they just weren’t cutting it in the job. Crying, the works, then escort them out of the building. Its pretty heart-wrenching. And no, I’m not a chickenshit that outsources the task to HR – I help them carry their little box of personal effects to their car, while they cry the whole way.
I’ve been fired. Never cried. Sucked, but I knew I could dust myself off and finding a new job was something I had some control over, and I never took it personally because I don’t measure my worth by what a bottom-line driven organization decides. But I never know how the people I fire will fare.
I think people all react differently to each side of the situation. I’ve got a safety net, so getting fired would suck (even with a family to support) but I know I’d recover fine. If you’re living closer to the edge, you’d understandably react more strongly. And because of that, if you’re someone like Fallows who likely has a quite good safety net (and a name to fall back on, and a wife with a name to fall back on) then you’d invest a lot more of your energy on the people you fire than on yourself when fired.
aimai
I think people are overthinking this. I think Mitt will do very well with the line “I like to fire people” with the very people who should hate him for it. The reason is that the idea of the power of “firing” people is very attractive to people who have zero power in the real world. Romney was implying that when you switch a service provider you are “firing” them. So when I eat at Burger King instead of at McDonald’s I’m “firing McDonald’s” and when I choose to have the car done at Jiffy Lube instead of some other place I’m ‘firing’ that other place. This is exactly the way the falling middle class wants to think about consumer experiences–as a place where they can finally enact some revenge on the indifferent fuckers who take their money and don’t even give them a please or a thank you.
People don’t care at all about torture or war or anything much. Its all too big for them. But have you ever seen people go batshit crazy over the question of whether they “have to” tip 15-20 percent? The debates about this are endless on public blogs and I can assure you that the average american schmuck wants to punish a whole lot of people for not being servile enough. They love the idea that consumer choice is political action and even more they love the idea that switching providers can be made to serve their emotional need to enact revenge for shitty service. Its pretty much all they’ve got.
aimai
Kyle
Repukes ideology embraces cruelty inflicted on out-groups like brown people overseas, but plenty of Fox News droolers see Magic Underpants Willard in the stuffed-shirt who laid them off. And that cuts like a buzz-saw through the lame cultural-war distractions the Repuke moneybags use to dupe the working class out of their votes while picking their pockets.
AA+ Bonds
@aimai:
I think this would have worked for much of the last two or three decades of American politics and may very well work again in the near future but we are in a sweet spot where, for the first time in a long time, it may not
AA+ Bonds
@Martin:
I’m sure all the black people working hard to keep the land their ancestors worked to the bone to give to them are very thankful for your effete liberal opinion that they should go fuck themselves
Thymezone
Leaving aside the personal side of this gaffe, what it says about Romney’s attitude toward people who work for him …. take a look at what it says about his understanding of health insurance.
The vast majority of Americans have NO opportunity to “fire” their health insurer because they have little or no choice in who the provider is. Their insurance is through their employer, and is built around group membership. If they “fire” their healthcare insurer, chances are they are on their own and looking at highway robbery rates to replace that insurance on their own. Unless you are a zillionaire, like …. well, like Mitt Romney. In which case, yeah, just fire the bastards and buy new insurance. It’s a drop in the bucket to a guy like that.
Romney is not the guy who can beat Barack Obama. He is so fucking elitist he makes John Kerry look like Archie Bunker.
Mark
@Martin: I’ve never observed anyone fire someone with an ounce of compassion. I worked for a sociopath boss and a sociopath CEO in my first job out of school and they cut people gleefully. In my second job, the investors pulled the plug on the company with 24 hours notice. In my third job, I ran into some new sociopaths who yelled at their direct reports and couldn’t even get it up to apologize – they claimed it was hard to fire people, but that rang pretty hollow given how they behaved otherwise. Job #4, nobody seems to get fired, but we’ve got good margins right now.
Chris O.
Some of the people in this thread would seem to have preferred Fallows to say that firing people is easy.
DCLaw1
The reason it resonates, out of context or not, is because it fits with everyone’s overall image of Romney. Which is to say, the blowback against the “fire people” remark is not the disease, but a symptom – a symptom that not only reflects the disease, but aggravates it further.
Triassic Sands
Well, some people need to be held accountable. Others, just need bigger bonuses.
Roger Moore
@mainsailset:
Note that Romney was not primarily a venture capitalist; he was more of a corporate raider. A venture capitalist provides funding and management expertise to startups in exchange for equity in the hope of making a big pay day when the company becomes successful. Corporate raiders specialise in taking companies over, extracting as much money from them as possible, and selling off the remains. Bain did some VC stuff, but their big profits were from tearing companies apart.
slag
Firing people is an admission of failure. On all sides. Anyone who claims that management isn’t at least partially responsible for the success or failure of their employees has never taken the job of management very seriously.
I am not surprised to find Mittens in that group.
Suffern ACE
@Chris O.: I suppose that’s one way to do it. The only thing that Romney is good at is the easiest thing someone can do! Now let’s see him do something harder, like showing up for work on time, or talking knowledgably about “the game” in the break room when one was actually watching Little House on the Prarie reruns.
Julie
@Mark: If you are a good boss and a person with at least an ounce of empathy, it sucks. It really sucks. Practically, of course, it doesn’t suck as badly for the person doing the firing as it does for the person who loses their job, but it’s still an awful, awful thing to have to do — even if there’s good cause to do it. Maybe it depends on the industry or the corporate culture or whatever, but my experience has been that no one who has even a little bit of humanity wants to fire someone. There’s a reason there are whole business models dedicated to doing just that so that people don’t have to feel like the bad guy.
@slag: Also, this. Totally this. It’s on you as a manager or a leader if you do have to fire someone.
JoeShabadoo
@mad the swine:
This. Fuck this guy. His overall point that firing people should be tough stands but telling us that firing people is more excrutiating makes me want to punch him in the face.
This guy is a Harvard graduate and former presidential speechwriter who has no clue what it is like for the average person to be fired. When he fires someone he feels bad, when the average person gets fired, especially today, they have to worry about things like paying for their house and food.
Steeplejack
@Chris O.:
I would have preferred Fallows to say that firing someone is less “excruciating” than being fired. As someone who has both been fired and had to fire people, I think there is no comparison: being fired is worse, for the reasons I stated above.
For Fallows to conclude the opposite, I think, is the effect of the small, relatively cozy world in which he resides: that of the brand-name pundit and public intellectual. To him being “fired” would be a far different experience from that of Joe Blow getting RIF’d at BigCorp Inc. Fallows has a name and could pick up writing gigs and probably another full-time spot without too much trouble. Joe Blow is just another one of thousands of account reps, service managers, Web designers–whatever–who would be competing for the remaining jobs in our still stagnant economy. What would be a disruption for Fallows would potentially be financial life and death for Joe Blow.
So, yeah, I can see how Fallows thinks that firing someone is more excruciating than being fired. I just think this is a rare case where he has his head up his ass.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@slag: Oh, but don’t you see, when Bain Capital comes in and fires people, it’s an admission that *previous* management fails. Very sadly, they cop to the fact that someone else fucked up. So sadly that the fucker-uppers get a severance bonus.
slag
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
Republicans got fired in 2008 (Finally!). Yet Mittens is probably on his fifth reading of Genius George’s book by now and chooses to blame GG’s successor for all the fucked-upedness GG left behind. So, maybe he should expect the same rules to apply to him in his occupation.
Doesn’t matter who broke it; the buyer owns it.
ruemara
I’ve fired and been fired. My firing was a relief to me, uncertainty be damned, because I was working for a collection of sociopaths in an all girl office. I did get let go for not being nice and they forced me to group hug and I wish I were kidding.
The few times I had to fire someone, I was upset because I knew they needed the work, I had striven to guide them, train them but they simply were not going to work out. Where I could, I directed them to other places that I thought would work. Usually, they prospered. Firing sucks, getting fired sucks worse.
Fallows must not ever have needed that next paycheck when he was fired. At the end of the day, when I was the manager, I had a job and the person I let go didn’t.
Arundel
I’ve been in denial for a long time, trying to see the best in everyone, our history, looking at the bright andf good sides, but honestly the topics raised here make me face the fact: as a country, we’re a gigantic bag of horrible, meanspirited, greedy nasty dicks. We really are. Or rather, that being a horrible, meanspirited, greedy nasty dick seems presented as a desirable quality and national ethos, in our politics and media culture. What we’re really talking about when we talk about when we talk about horrible, meanspirited, greedy nasty dicks is actually called “Republicans”. And this dreadful, anti-human way of life has been polished to a gleam and presented to us as a virtue for many, many years now. One despairs. Doghouse Riley:
http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2012/01/its-long-hard-climb-boys-but-i-swear-to.html
CT Voter
@aimai:
If Mitt Romney could convince anyone, anywhere, that he believed anything…then I would put money on your claim. The problem with Mitt Romney is Mitt Romney. You can get away with a lot of things while running for president.
Mitt Romney? I think that’s a lift too heavy even for the Republicans, who have successfully convinced, tragically, so many voters in the past that Republicans are Real Americans.
Well, rephrasing is in order. I hope that’s a lift too heavy.
CT Voter
If Mitt Romney (with the shoulders you could land a 747 on, a granite jaw…Hollywood good looks, five strapping sons) were actually a charismatic candidate rather than who Mitt Romney actually is?
Good grief.
DCLaw1
@CT Voter:
Speaking of, isn’t it weird how, what, twice in the last week or two he’s made reference to his own broad shoulders? (As in, “I’ve got broad shoulders, I can handle the attacks.”)
Phil Perspective
@Tom Q: One can only hope that Mittens implodes later today. If he doesn’t get at least 40% of the vote. it’s a BFD. And they’d be doing it all bashing Mittens from the left. Pass the popcorn!!
dogwood
@mad the swine
I think you are over reacting, Fallows is speaking for himself only. If someone as employable and financially comfortable as Fallows said it was harder to be fired than to fire someone, I’d think a lot less of him in terms of the empathy factor.
dogwood
And with this line you are doing exactly what you claimed to have loathed in the last thread. Why on earth do you feel a need to put some ridiculous disclaimer before linking to Jim Fallows? Well, I don’t intend to apologize for liking Jim Fallows. He’s a great writer, a good liberal, a good Democrat and a kind and gracious man.
Xenos
@dogwood: Exactly. Anyone who knows who Fallows is would know that he can get a new job within a few minutes of picking up the phone. Good for him. That he is more distressed about firing someone who, in that industry, is almost certainly more vulnerable than he is, well, that says something even better about him. Unless one doubts his sincerity I can’t figure out how one can think otherwise of him for this statement.
LosGatosCA
Fallows is absolutely correct, in almost every detail. And most people I’ve ever met agree with him.
I once got ‘pardoned’ from a ticket – I was slightly speeding, but I also cut off the cop in the traffic circle because I was oblivious.
He stops me and asks me how I’m doing. Not so well, I said, I have to let someone go at work this morning. He replied, you were 10 over the limit and you almost hit me. I said sorry.
Then he says that he’s a sargeant and had to let somebody go a few months before. Slow down, watch where you are going.
Years before that I worked at GE in a division that had experienced large layoffs 24 months before I arrived, It’s not a place humanitarians hang out, but the finance managers I worked with were so affected by it even 4 years later they would talk about – not how hard it was that was obvious – how it had scarred all of them, the folks laid off and the managers who had to make the decisions. And they were glad things had turned around – again not because of the money or financial security – because they couldn’t ever do that again.
But Mitt straps his dog to the roof of his car and likes to fire people.
harlana
I have been fired more than anyone here, I am sure! After a while, you get used to it.
Until you can’t find another job
harlana
probably what pisses a lot of people off is that Wall Street should have been fired
and here’s Romney, trying, not very successfully mind you, to not come off as a soulless bankster type – and he says he likes to fire people – i don’t give a fuck what the context was, he said it, without hesitation
that’s going on the Paul and Gingrich loop for a while – it’s so nice we have them to do our dirty work for us!
gelfling545
With all the ridiculous things Romney is saying I’m trying to imagine just what he might say to leaders of foreign countries who might not be feeling precisely friendly towards us. And when he was in business did they have to keep him locked in his office when negotiations were going on or did they just slap tape over his mouth?
Palli
Fallows has no understanding of a basic belief most real workers have: 9 times out of 10 the person(s) who are fired are the people who should not be fired.
Palli
@dogwood:
Your thinking seems mixed up. Empathy is about feeling for another person not exalting your own feelings. When I have been fired it didn’t make me feel any better that my boss felt “badly” about it.
Of course, Fallows is speaking only for himself; he knows nothing else.
The trouble with commentators like Fallows is that their wold of experience is so narrow they can’t think outside of themselves so therefore what they think is understood as important and universal…useful to everyone else. He literally knows nothing about what being fired means and, apparently doesn’t care enough to find out, so he substitutes and equates it with a feeling he does know. Talk about inadequate equivalencies!
Auldblackjack
Yeah, there’s something wrong. It’s called Antisocial Personality Disorder. The single greatest problem we have created for ourselves over the last few decades is making the character traits of this mentally ill subgroup of the population the ideal of successful individuals in business and public life. Time to get a new feckin’ yardstick.
Dave
Jesus, you people are a bunch of navel-gazing emo whiners. Fallows is right– firing someone is worse.
When you get fired, you have the stress of the unknown. Will I be able to get work again, how will I pay my bills, etc. The initial feeling of helplessness is a terrible, terrible thing. Once you’ve come out the other side, you realize, to use a cliche, you wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone.
Now imagine it’s your job to fire someone. You are deliberately causing someone to have that experience. If you have a shred of empathy, it will tear you apart inside. Who purposely wants to make someone suffer?
Palli
@Dave: Apparently Romney and plenty of other American business people. Who said we were talking about people with a shed of empathy?…and a shred is never enough.
If Fallows and any other other people with the position to fire people did feel more deeply than the firee there would be no contesting unemployment hearings; no denials of pensions, etc.
I have been fired twice: in both cases, my departure created a measurable negative impact on the rest of the staff (paid and volunteer) and their public clientele. Despite expressed regret that it was a necessary, if difficult, firing- there was never any indication that the “hard” management decision was anything other then a momentary blip in the boss’ work life.
NO, if someone has the feeling they are “deliberately causing someone [that] terrible, terrible thing” helplessness, they should help to alleviate it! And there would be many ways to do that.
Or was the lack of empathy your point?
jibeaux
In the context of what he was talking about, he was saying, I think, that he likes being able to take his business elsewhere. So why doesn’t he just say that like a normal human person? Normal human people don’t say that they “fired” a restaurant or a bank or whatever…Oh wait. Never mind, I figured it out.
Paul in KY
@Steeplejack: Generally, if I had to choose, I would rather fire someone than be fired myself.
This is assuming that the person I must fire deserves to be fired.
Dave
@Palli:
It was. My feeling is for a normally-functioning human being, having to fire someone is worse, because you understand what you’re about to put them through is awful. It is the difference between having a bad thing done to you or doing a bad thing to another person. Only sociopaths can do the latter without it affecting them, IMO.
Fallows recognizes that, which is why I think he’s on the side of the angels here.
Someguy
@DCLaw1:
He’s got magical underwear too in case the shoulder thing doesn’t work out.
billiecat
I don’t understand all the “context” malarkey on this quote. The key points is, and in context, that Mitt Romney likes to fire people. Saying he’s talking about health insurance companies doesn’t help him because *he’s* the idiot who thinks corporations are people, my friend. Mitt Romney likes to fire people, real ones or imaginary ones. It’s that simple.
Palli
@Dave:
But the sociopath doesn’t feel it — the angels aren’t even in the picture for a sociopath.
As I said earlier, in the real work world, a reference to “firing” is not usually understood as “Just firing” (as in Just War). The action of firing should not be assumed to be always honest and appropriate or even in the best interests of the business. Once again the “business religion” leads us astray.
If, indeed, you are not a sociopath and fire someone for poor reasons, as many firings are, you have chosen that action. Frankly, I don’t worry much about the feelings of the person doing the bad thing to another person…