Layoffs are immoral

Today the layoff swindlers who argue that taking the earnings away from thousands and thousands of families is necessary always promise the same thing: After the painful but unavoidable disruption, a new revivified company will emerge, one that is more sustainable, a state of affairs more beneficial to everyone involved, including somehow, the people who will not be employed by it. American workers have been told this for three decades now. It was always a lie. What we have gotten instead is a system in which shareholders and consultants make more money than ever and the lives of workers become increasingly precarious. Life after one layoff means, at best, finding another job where the whole cycle will begin anew.

Layoffs are immoral. To deprive someone of a wage not because he is failing to earn it or because you can no longer afford to pay it but because you have decided that you would prefer not to pay him is robbery. The fact that it has been a widely accepted and almost universally recommended business practice for more than 30 years tells us one thing: Corporations do not exist to deliver goods and services to people. Nor are they there to provide employment to workers. They are a nihilistic engine for the accumulation of wealth. Just as equine sporting events provide the necessary arithmetic for a numbers racket, so too is the fantasy of the corporation that Does Something an unavoidable component of making it possible for people to profit from an increase in its stock price. These people are playing Pokémon with the nation’s wealth.