*full list of resources/references at the bottom*
last week i read an article about 900 employees fired over zoom. i couldn’t believe what i’d read. and then i laughed because
Among those fired were the diversity, equity and inclusion recruiting team.
mr. garg really went for the gut. and last year, he wrote and sent an email to his employees calling them dumb dolphins.
“HELLO — WAKE UP BETTER TEAM,” writes Vishal Garg, the CEO of Better.com, in an email to employees obtained by Forbes. “You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and…DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”
he hadn’t even used any expletives. i mean, these are all words that can be said in a children’s movie, but if i had sent an email like that to anybody, i would’ve been written up or fired on the spot. that’s not even to mention garg’s accusations against 250 of the 900 employees who allegedly only worked 2 hours a day.
as the updates roll in, Better.com announced that their CEO is taking time off, effective immediately and that they’ve “engaged a third party to ‘do a leadership and cultural assessment.’” (shouldn’t they have done that when the ‘dumb dolphins’ email was sent?)
one of Better’s employees, a Mr. Chapman, even started a YouTube channel where he talks about the incident and interviews other former employees (it’s really interesting, actually). while i can appreciate the transparency and vulnerability after such an awful experience it does make me wonder: what about the other 899?
now the comments under Mr. Chapman’s first video are nothing but positive and uplifting, rightfully so.
anything less than positive and uplifting on this man’s YouTube channel is unacceptable and rude, but i can’t help but wonder if this—the firing of 900 employees in a 3-minute zoom conference—could have been prevented.
sometimes i wonder if we’re so used to bad things happening that we learn to expect them. people lose their jobs all the time. people break bones all the time, too. people fail and restart and fail again. it’s like we know floods can destroy entire towns after which we applaud the Good Samaritan donations of food and supplies, but where was that sort of urgency when we were petitioning for the dam to be fixed?
why do we always wait to offer goodwill after the tragedy and not before? why weren’t preventative measures put in place?
garg isn’t the first CEO to mistreat employees and the punishment used to teach him is PTO?
too many responses say, “garg should have been kinder. he should’ve been more empathetic.” one person even went so far as to say, “this is a reminder that your employer is not your friend.”
UM. WE BEEN KNOWN THAT.
screw kinder and more empathetic! that’s the least garg should have done. that’s the kind of energy you reserve for non-billionaires like me who are forced to climb up as opposed to billionaires who condescend from their lofty penthouses. why are you giving advice to the people who were fired? and why is the only advice to the CEO “be nicer”?
don’t coddle the CEO!
we wear helmets when riding bicycles and playing football (the american version, although i’m sure the football version of the rest of the world would also do well from helmets). we save money for future vacations, and write wills describing inheritance for our descendants. we backup our computers on external hard drives and probably create extra copies on other hard drives. we take vitamins, we exercise, and we eat well in hopes of living longer. we take DNA tests to determine the likelihood of heart disease and Alzheimer’s. these are all precautions we take just in case.
there’s a term for it in the medical field: preventative healthcare.
Preventative healthcare consists of measures taken for disease prevention. Disease and disability are affected by environmental factors, genetic predisposition, disease agents, and lifestyle choices, and are dynamic processes which begin before individuals realize they are affected. Disease prevention relies on anticipatory actions that can be categorized as primal, primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. (source, Wikipedia)
preventative healthcare is not a guarantee but a method to lessen the likelihood of, well, bad things. it’s to heighten the extent to which we can endure the bad things. the more precautions put in place, the less likely the bad things—the pain—will be threatening.
but what preventative measures are put in place for running businesses?
employees are given manuals. even before they’re employees, they go to college and university for the degree which would make them eligible for said job. they perfect résumés and take all the Indeed courses to excel in the interview. they attend unpaid and paid trainings, and endure all the dead-end internships, and finally land the job to grow your company only to be let go.
all this time and effort and energy only to be subject to the whims of a “brilliant, brash and mercurial” CEO.
so employees are supposed to rise from the ashes? they’re the ones who are supposed to see the light at the end of the tunnel and knock on another door? they’re the ones who are supposed to be ready for every misfortune while the CEO does what? shoot themselves and electric cars into space while employees pee in used water bottles? as the CEOs lobby politicians for tax cuts, their employees are encouraged to apply for food stamps despite accepting a job offer from them?
as far as preventative measures go, where are they?
the problem is not that they were fired. people are fired everyday. the problem isn’t the lack of integrity and it’s not that the CEO is an insensitive jerk.
the problem is that there is such an individualistic approach as to how to improve and/or resolve these employee/employer situations. it rings similar to individuals and climate change:
if you just stop buying cheaper plastic products and invest in reusable items, you too can stop-!
no. they can’t.
It is important for [the United States] to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self. - bell hooks
it’s amazing that Mr. Chapman has a great attitude and can find support in his new ventures despite being so unceremoniously let go but instead of complimenting him for his graciousness, how about
LET’S NOT PUT A*SHOLES IN POSITIONS OF POWER!
how good or bad the 900 employees were does not speak to the larger problem at hand. the individual morality and intentions of employees cannot be used to dismiss the individual morality and intentions of anyone in power, in this case CEOs, solely because there is an imbalance of power.
while these are not perfect examples, it is akin to the power imbalance between a child and an adult. the power imbalance between an animal and a human. the power imbalance between a discarded plastic bottle and a dump truck. even if the morality and intentions of the plastic bottle and the dump truck are the same, the effects of the latter’s choices far outweighs the plastic bottle’s.
there is no way in hell or heaven or earth or Mars or Pluto that you can ever convince me that a child hitting an adult is the same as an adult hitting a child.
this is not to say that garg, as a CEO, cannot run his business how he wants. of course he can. sure, garg can fire whoever he wants, whenever he wants, but did no one in his immediate counsel have the authority (or, hell, bravery) to say, “hey, maybe let’s not. let’s not, okay, and find ways to fix whatever difficulties our company has before firing 900 people and forcing them to seek unemployment benefits that vary state by state. i mean, sir, statistically for every 250 applications 1 job listing receives, only 1 offer is made. i can’t do math very well, but that doesn’t sound like great odds for the 900 you want to let go. surely, there’s a way to mitigate these logistics. right? surely being mercurial isn’t a good example of leadership.”
does garg not have peers and mentors he can go to—like the peers and mentors employees are encouraged to find and pursue—to temper his mercurial-ness? every career coach would tell me that if i were mercurial, i would have to change to be less so. in fact, as a potential employee, career coaches would have me pay them thousands of dollars to tell me that i ought to expect that my employer will be mercurial and that i, as a good employee, should just roll with it. why? because the employers are the ones in power. they’re the ones with money and i am the beggar who cannot be a chooser.
i am the plastic bottle, crushed by a dump truck, ridiculed by glass bottles (who could also be easily crushed!), for not moving out of the way of a dump truck.
people are led to believe that the pandemic is the first time and therefore the only reason mass layoffs would happen. it’s easy to say (and believe), “well, the panini we’re in changed everything!” i’d like to replace a word: “the panoramic we’re in exposed everything.” you see, this is not the first massive layoff nor is it the largest, and it likely won’t be the last.
jobs will always be lost. jobs will always evolve. people will always be replaced and asked to evolve. if as employees, we’re going to evolve, then we cannot rely on our individualism. we cannot use our individual goodness or badness to erase the systemic issues that are thriving in our current culture.
and while it might be scary to read headlines like this,
it does indicate a step toward a collective understanding—a unionizing, if you will—that CEOs better watch out. change is coming and it won’t be in their mercurial hands for much longer.
There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures. - bell hooks
*full list of resources/references*
* Better.com CEO fires 900 employees over Zoom
* Mortgages, Fraud Claims, and ‘Dumb Dolphins’
* Better.com CEO blasts laid-off employees, accusing them of ‘stealing’ by working only two hours daily
* Better.com's CEO is 'taking time off effective immediately' after firing 900 employees on Zoom
* 'It was callous,' says man who was laid off with 900 employees on a Zoom call
* Christian Chapman YouTube video, Better.com Zoom Layoff_ Starting Over_ Wholesaling real estate
* Wikipedia page, Preventative Healthcare
* Individuals can’t solve the climate crisis. Governments need to step up
* Adam Ruins Everything - Climate Change is Already Happening. Now what?
* Why Voting Is Important
* Why You Can’t Get A Job … Recruiting Explained By the Numbers
* It’s not a ‘labor shortage.’ It’s a great reassessment of work in America.
* Goodbye, Pandemic. Hello, Panera Bread… Or Panda Express… Or Pandora
* Pandemic Exposes Global Unpreparedness in Handling Health, Climate Challenges, Expert Says, as Second Committee Begins General Debate
* The Biggest Corporate Layoffs of the Century (So Far)
* Job Cuts in Pandemic Come So Fast That Warning Laws Are Gutted
* A Worker’s Perspective On Mass Layoffs
* Why America has 8.4 million unemployed when there are 10 million job openings
edited by Julianne Day Ignacio of Verge of Verse
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