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YouTubeOhio Law Allows Workers To Be Fired At Any TimeUPDATED: 12:54 pm EDT May 5, 2006
CLEVELAND -- A local man who spent 30 years as an account executive gets fired for no apparent reason. He didn't make a mistake. He had a stellar work record. But when new owners came in, he was shown the door.
5 On Your Side consumer specialist Angie Lau reported that it happens all the time, and in Ohio the laws do little to protect you.
Ray is still trying to get past the day that shattered everything he knew about working hard and loyalty.
Columbus Underground Messageboard » General Columbus Discussion
Ohio Law Allows Workers To Be Fired At Any Time
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Walker
The KLD / Downtown
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Posted 6 years ago # -
gramarye
In Exile
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At-will employment sounds harsh but it actually does far more to fight unemployment than any more facially "pro-labor" system. You can look to France right now for a case study in the ill effects of the opposite. The labor laws there are practically as restrictive as our tenure system in universities. Once a company hires someone, they're basically stuck with them for life unless they rape a 12-year-old and don't have a sympathetic excuse. If you know that it's going to cost you a fortune in legal fees to get rid of someone, you think long and hard before putting up the "Help Wanted" sign and taking out that classified ad.
The better kinds of labor regulations are the ones that force employers to put aside retirement and other benefits for employees in accounts that are actually owned by the employees and therefore travel with them even if the company decides to be a jerk. I know people in my uncle's old factory that were fired after 24 years on the job; you needed 25 to lock in your pension benefits.
If you've been filling up your 401(k) (assuming your employer offers one), contributing to a Roth IRA, and building up equity in your home (even a modest one, no need for a mansion in Victorian Village), you'll be in decent shape if you've held a job for 30 years (especially because I'm pretty sure you're automatically eligible for social security at that point).
Posted 6 years ago # -
Coremodels
Really close to Explorer's Club.
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gram:
MOSTLY agree, although because my father went through a similar situation there's a couple factors that can COMPLETELY hose a guy at the 25-30 year mark...mainly kids in college.
A lot of people surrender the equity in their home to pay for college for the kids or take on new debt burden, and heaven forbid you have more than one in at the same time.
I do completely agree with an "at will" employment situation 95% of the time. Where you have to watch carefully is abuses such as firing long term employees nearing pensions that are then subject to losing them in favor of a company's bottom line or getting rid of people who suddenly have long term health problems to keep insurance costs down.
Posted 6 years ago # -
ander1999
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I disagree with your assessment. This takes away the freedom of both employee and employer; we are in a free market economy. If that individual who has 30 years in a company got offered a new job making 40% more somewhere else, you'd probably be cheering him on.
As an employer, I've had this happen, and it sucks. You lose 30 years of experience, knowledge about your business and relationships this person has built overtime.
On the flip side, if you know that one individual is costing you tons of healthcare dollars, it might be the right thing for everyone to let this person go. All businesses need to be profitable or guess what, they go under and everyone looses.
I love the statement on the plaque outside of Rhodes Tower by Mr. Rhodes, it says "Profit is not a dirty word in Ohio".
Sometimes it sucks to be the coldhearted asshole, but most of those decisions are made for the greater good, not just one employee.
Posted 6 years ago # -
gramarye
In Exile
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Thank you, Mr. Ander. You just illustrated my point.
If you keep a guy for 29 years and know that keeping him for that one last year is going to be the most expensive ever for you on the margin because after that he's entitled to legacy benefits, then the incentive to cut him loose becomes extremely strong. Hence the need for portable, employee-owned benefits packages.
I'm not going to pull punches on this. If you offer pension benefits that vest at 30 years and routinely cut people loose at 29, I have no sympathy for you if you find yourself chafing under regulatory restraints. All that means is that you hold those benefits out like a mirage to keep people working for you for all those extra years and never have any real intention of giving them to many people. With all those extra profits you keep by turning people out, you can afford a good lawyer to help you navigate the regulatory waters.
Posted 6 years ago # -
ander1999
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And the same can be said of a business owner who invests all the time, money and training in a great sales team, who then after years of a mutually beneficial relationship takes all their accounts and contacts to another firm and screw over the business owner just to make two bucks more.
This happens all the time and can sink a company. Just like firing someone 2 hours before their retirement can sink them.
Goes both ways.
Posted 6 years ago # -
gramarye
In Exile
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anders: Come on. The business owner has unlimited discretion to fire 2 hours before the retirement vests. The sales team would have to coordinate a heck of a lot more, and there would have to be another opportunity out there for them. Plus if they were worth $2 more, you could always give them a raise to match market rate.
If you're really planning on firing someone within a year of retirement after years of loyal service, you shouldn't pretend to offer retirement benefits in the first place. At least then people have realistic expectations of what's waiting for them. Leading someone on with a false promise might be good business but it's somewhat more lacking in the realm of human decency. That kind of behavior is what gives ammunition to labor-rights activists.
Posted 6 years ago # -
ander1999
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Listen, I'm not defending or condoning the practice; I just say let the free market exercise its rights.
In today's market, nothing is promised. Do you have a pension at your current job? Do you know what one is? No, because we know 401K's and IRA's and the like.
Do you reasonably expect to receive Social Security benefits? No, that’s why we're all working like hell and saving our buns off.
A business owner has the right, at least in Ohio, to hire or fire for any or no reason. Being an owner of several companies I know this to be true, unless two things. One, the employee is under a contract with the employer. For instance, I will provide X service for X number of dollars between the dates of X and X.
Two, the employee has a collective bargaining agreement with a union.
Contracts I can deal with, but unions I will not. I have refused to hire someone for a job because they were in a union. From my perspective, unions care about one thing, there power. Not the employee, not the employer, just themselves.
This is why you have GM in such a bind. The unions refuse to budge.
All that being said to argue that free market is the way. Let those asshole business owners fire someone when they want to. Let the sales teams leave with contracts and relationships. They both have to live with themselves.
Also, bottom line, I have never, nor do I know of any business owner, who has ever fired anyone who has show they can provide value to the business. Period. This usually leads to making or saving the company money. Which I think is a good thing.
Posted 6 years ago # -
gramarye
In Exile
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I won't argue with you about the unions. I agree with you there, or at least I think the NLRB has definitely interfered with the market more than is prudent. I don't mind the idea of unions as voluntary associations (any more than I mind the idea of any other voluntary association), but they have been allowed and willing to use their heft to sabotage the very industries on which their members rely. Killing the golden goose.
I'm also not going to argue with you about Social Security. I completely agree with you there, because it's the same kind of system as a traditional pension: non-proprietary before vesting. I fully favor personal/private accounts because they have the advantages of portability and inheritability (in case you don't make it to 65, at least your kids will enjoy the fruits of your labor), in addition to a nearly universal higher rate of return that the constructive 1.7% rate over the last 30 years or so returned by traditional social security (you could do better just buying a bunch of CoD's and Treasury securities, and even better if you were willing to take a chance on some AA corporate bonds or large-cap stocks that are still low-risk).
However, the "free market" libertarian fantasy is just that, a fantasy. It's a simplistic abstraction of a complex reality, and willfully ignores minutiae of real-world existence that are inconvenient details for the free-market ideologue but which are all too relevant to the day-to-day existence of working America.
As I said before, I know that the incentive to fire someone on retirement's doorstep is tremendous, because the marginal cost to the employer of that last year of work is tremendous. I took more than enough economics courses in college. This is why I favor employee-owned, portable assets that don't allow for those kinds of shenanigans. However, the predicate assumptions of the laissez-faire philosophy are impure, and are at best misleading and at worst shamelessly deceitful when people start believing them in toto. Among these assumptions: unlimited labor-market flexibility and liquidity (the assumption that people will automatically and seamlessly transition into whatever employment is most productive) and symmetry of the employer-employee relationship (the notion that there is equality in the relationship because either party can terminate the relationship at will). The latter is a flawed assumption because a truly symmetric power structure would be one in which the worker could fire *the boss* as easily as the boss could fire the worker, not one in which the worker could fire *themselves* as easily as the boss could fire the worker. It's not "symmetry" to say "you can leave, or I can make you leave." That's not "going both ways."
Free market thinking is a useful analytical tool. Absent grounding in reality, however, it's too abstract to make a rational governing economic policy. Purist free market policy is like a nice, neat, orderly battle plan. Logically internally consistent. Theoretically perfect. And you know what they say about battle plans and first contact with the enemy. Government exists in large part to provide protection for people in situations in which they are far more vulnerable than the people that could take advantage of them. Does that mean that I think "home stretch" legislation (making it harder to fire someone as they get close to retirement) is a good idea? Probably not, in the ultimate analysis, for the reasons I've said before: portable asset accounts are less intrusive and more flexible. However, I'm not going to reject the idea out of hand just because it might interfere with a more libertarian conception of how the market should operate. I'm a utilitarian, not a libertarian. That which works best for the most is the best policy.
Posted 6 years ago # -
ander1999
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While I can also agree with your analysis, I think its a bit too ivory tower. If you as an employee can prove value, no company will EVER fire you. Never, never, never.
If they do, and you truly have that value, you will be picked up so fast it'll make your head spin.
I saw this during the .domb era. It was great for everyone, b/c at the end, the super talented technologists were snapped up in a minute and the techies who were adding low value to the companies they worked for floundered about working at Starbucks and Microcenter until last year or so. Loved it.
This was also true for the mediocre salespeople, designers, finance, etc...
Shake outs are good...They make everyone pull down their pants and show.
Posted 6 years ago #
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