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this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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The current trend of layoffs in times that the company is in no danger makes more sense if you think about it like pre-civilization rituals. To appease the gods (Wall Street), you first need a blood sacrifice (employees).
The person making the choice to sacrifice others is the shaman (CEO) who, coincidentally, is never the one who actually has to suffer the consequences of the sacrifice. That shaman (CEO) exercises this using esoteric and internal knowledge (market savviness) which entitles them to maintain a preeminent and powerful position in the tribe (company).
And it is always based on unassailable logic: When the tribe (company) is doing well, it means that the sacrifice worked and should happen more often. When the tribe (company) is not doing well, it means the sacrifice wasn't enough and should happen more often.
There are a lot of things that make capitalism a religion, and this is definitely one of them.
Praise the All Powerful Market and His Invisible Hand!
But I think the argument here is a specific business lines are failing. Namely advertising revenue for Linear. Linear TV is cable. So as cable subs get cut, you can't just shift linear staff over to digital, because digital staff were already hired and working in parallel to build that business.
It's strange. On lemmy people hate ads. They hate cable TV. But you have to realize if people stop watching ads and people stop paying for cable, then people that work in that area will probably lose jobs.
I think my concern is that businesses operate in an "empathy-free" zone that we tolerate because we're used to it. The strictures of market economics certainly are hard to argue with when employing 100 people is the difference between a business surviving or failing.
The layoffs that are happening now are not going to cause Paramount to succeed where it failed, just like the ones at Google, Meta, Microsoft, Disney, Spotify, and so on. They are about maintaining a certain profitability metric.
While that type of spreadsheet game may be normal, it really isn't necessary. For Paramount, for example, good people could often be redeployed to other areas. Treating employees like people means understanding that there should be a higher bar for layoffs. Employees are committing a substantial part of their life to work - most of our waking hours of a finite life. The idea that a layoff happens because a CEO, Wall Street or other "stakeholder" can't be bothered to try to redeploy their talents is just deeply depressing and dehumanizing, in subtle ways.
I'm not naive, I understand capitalism. But it doesn't need to be this way.
I think there needs to be better unemployment security and resourcing. I think there are certain jobs that should be let go over time. IE, if we get off fossil fuels, I would expect a lot of people to lose those jobs in fossil fuel. As we get more automation, that is going to replace those jobs. I think right now it's hard to determine what is reasonable or justified layoffs for business reasons, and what is really there to just pump the stock up. But everyone knows cable TV is going to die... I would expect jobs to be cut. Similarly Sky TV recently also had a layoff of a percentage of the work force. That primarily hit the technician team that was responsible for installing cable boxes in people's homes.
I am hoping one day we can have tax system that makes sense and is fair, and support a UBI eventually.
What I find kind of amusing about some of the comments on this thread are the communist leaning folks seem to parrot neo libs where the solutions is jobs for the sake of jobs.
Lol, it's a good thing you have learned now that the communists are not who they claim to be.