The reason why the hot water faucet in the men's room of our office building groaned like a dying elephant, I decided, was that we rented a cheap square foot. "Guaranteed employment" is a form of economic pyrite, the inclusive making of wealth a favor and not an obligation. Hire — the return from another's risk is enough to afford services. Termination — the returns can no longer sustain, nor justify, payment for those services. Those who answer to another at the start of a business day, however covetous, aren't treated to sleepless nights of trying to meet a coming payroll.
Forecasts for the company I left yesterday — historically bright — had, earlier in the year, showed a brindle. It worried, months later worrying more, and then it propelled action: reduction in force, or more palpably, layoff. Speculation on the floor was conflagrated, of course. Concerns were known, but their reports did not meet in sequence the dispositive action. Could the alarm have been more graduated, the directors' response to shortfalls more visibly even? A warning to staff of necessary cuts following the last quarter, given this week, might have inspired the kind of miraculousness of self-preservation. And then, the incisions could have been partial and discrete, affecting pay and other remuneration. Lopping off entire positions with little said beforehand is serious, yes, though it is also unsettling in that it is perceived as total and arbitrary. Among the living it's whispered, Who's next?
But right there is the subjective dimension of leadership. If not omnificent, executives have a limited set of remedies. The president of the company, in his exposition of the grounds for my respectful separation, defended the severance benefits as "generous" — they were — yet fumbled in a search for words when, in painful sensibility, he contrasted them with the highest beneficence of continued employment. "It is what it is," I interjected, and he agreed, and the formalities were over.
In presidential debates, especially those of the party out of the White House, the laid off worker is an anticipated guest on the presumption that he will be a) resentful and b) eager for federal subsidies. Were I to end up behind a microphone, candidates leaning forward with condescension at the ready, I would say: "I recently lost my job. I was given funds, based on what I earned, to support me until I could be hired by another. 'Uncle Sam's cut,' as my former employer put it, was over one-third of the payment and will, in probability, be directed to entitlements, none of which I wish to receive. If elected president, what would you do to spare the vulnerable from dependence on Washington, caused by a bankrupting by Washington?"