Sacked By SMS
from the that's-one-way-to-do-it dept
After all these stories of the horrible ways people have been laid off, this one appears to be the worst. How would you like to get fired via an text message on your cell phone. That's what appears to have happened to an office admin, who was told not to come in the next day via an SMS text message. When she called to find out what was up, her boss had turned off his phone. She finally went in to the office to find out that she had been fired.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Lawsuits?
Now I'm not advocating frivolous lawsuits, but there's a reason why at so-called "old economy" companies it was a major undertaking to fire somebody -- you had to do everything correctly to protect the company against a lawsuit. With all of the sloppiness being reported, I'm surprised that more of these inexperienced dot-com managers aren't having their own rash actions coming back to haunt them in the courtroom.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Lawsuits?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Lawsuits?
My point is that if inexperienced managers are laying people off without taking steps to insure that the layoffs are handled carefully and legally, they may be opening themselves up to lawsuits that just might have some reasonable basis. Giving notice via email or SMS, although rude, is certainly not cause for a lawsuit, but if it is any indication of the level of care exercised by the company's management, they may have screwed up in more substantive ways.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]