Brian Gaar
Getting laid off sucks. Especially when it comes out of the blue.
And this video should be on the Mount Rushmore of how not to fire people. TikTok user Ori (@quartsizemasonjar) shared a horrific video of getting fired via a Zoom call (scroll to the end for the full video).
She captioned it: “In honor of my severance check clearing – please enjoy the quickest layoff on the land.”
Ori sounded shocked in the video, even breaking down in tears at one point. But her manager and the HR person just kept talking robotically (probably reading from a script) as she processed what was going on.
“We very much appreciate all the work that you’ve done during your time here,” the manager said. “Your accounts will be shut down during the meeting, and you will no longer have access to any [company]-owned systems.”
The manager then immediately got off the call and handed it over to HR. It was very cold and bloodless, basically corporate America at its worst.
Oh and a fun side note: she said that the person who fired her got promoted a few days later.
The video went viral, and commenters were on Ori’s side.
Overall, layoffs are at historically low levels. CNBC reports that throughout 2022, the monthly layoff rate has hovered around 1 percent of the U.S. workforce, about 1.4 million people.
But in the tech sector, we’ve seen mass layoffs at high-profile companies like Twitter, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce, HP, Lyft, and Doordash. More than 50,000 workers in tech lost their jobs in November, which is up from 12,600 in October.
These have been come to be known as “loud layoffs” because they’re covered a lot in the media.
“These are very salient layoffs, even if they don’t affect that many people and are actually quite contained to tech and closely related industries,” says Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. “They are loud. They are very public. They’re talked about all over social media.”
We hope that Ori finds a new job soon — one that treats its employees better. (The original video has since been deleted)
h/t: Daily Dot
