Anatomy of a Corporate Layoff

One year ago, I was fired.

Not laid off—fired. In a layoff, you go home until the factory calls you back to work. I got fired.

Everyone knew there would be a bloodbath. Management tried to keep it secret. But we knew.

Human resources experts say mass firings should take place on a Friday. Worker bees are used to going home for the weekend. Duh.

Mine took place on a Thursday. Which was my fault. A couple of weeks earlier, when management still believed that their Big Layoff was a big secret, I had told my boss I wanted that Friday off. They rescheduled the firings for me. To my erstwhile coworkers: sorry about harshing your Friday.

When it came, I knew there was a good chance I’d be on the death list. It wasn’t rocket science: my boss didn’t like me. “Painful as it may be, a layoff is a good time to terminate marginal employees,” wrote Guy Kawasaki in “The Art of the Layoff.” Painful for the employee. Fun for the boss. “Marginal” is corporatese for “disliked by one’s boss.”

I worked three days a week for a company called United Media, which syndicates comic strips like “Dilbert” and “Peanuts” to newspapers. It is owned by E.W. Scripps, a media conglomerate based in Cincinnati. My title was editor of acquisitions and development. I was a talent scout: I recruited cartoonists and writers, worked with them to craft their features into saleable features, then edited them after they launched. It was fun. It was also hard. On several occasions, I was pressed to do things I thought were unethical, things that screwed cartoonists and writers. As a cartoonist and writer myself, I refused.

My reviews were mostly positive. But I was given two bits of negative feedback: I didn’t seem to care about filling out forms. (There were a lot of forms.) And I sided with the “talent” rather than the company.

I began to suspect the axe was going to fall months before it did, when Lisa—Lisa was my boss—dithered about, then refused to approve, my travel to the 2009 San Diego Comicon. Sure, times were tight, especially in the media business. But I’d gone in 2007 and 2008. And other execs were getting their travel approved. Lisa went to Germany for a book fair. Hm.

Lisa harassed me relentlessly. She gave me impossible tasks with no chance of success: “Develop a turnkey solution for newspaper websites.” Citing the flimsiest of excuses, she canceled projects she had previously green-lighted. I was an executive; she assigned me to menial tasks previously left to junior editors. She insulted me during staff meetings. “Why don’t you do your job, Ted? For once?”

In retrospect I realize she had just given up trying to goad me into quitting.

Sitting fake-casually on the big red sofas by the “Peanuts” ephemera in the lobby that Thursday morning were two huge goons. Each wore those nametags you get when you visit an office. Subtle.

I closed my office door and called a friend to discuss my sense of impending doom. “I’ve been through it six times,” he told me. “Here’s how it’ll happen. Lisa will ask you: ‘Can you step in for a minute?’ You’ll go in. Someone from HR will be there.”

I hung up. I worked on a memo about how the company should adapt to the changing syndication market by offering marketing and management services to freelance, non-syndicated cartoonists and other content providers. I cc-ed my fellow execs, most of whom already knew what I was about to learn. Send. A half-hour passed. No replies. The phone rang. It was Lisa. “Ted? Can you step in for a minute?” she asked. I walked down the hall, turned left and walked into her office. Carol from HR was sitting under the stuffed Dilbert.

“As you know, the blah blah problems in the business blah blah position is being eliminated blah blah blah not acquiring new properties blah there’s a meeting at 11 for everyone who’s being reduced blah blah blah blah blah—”

“Reduced”?

You’ve heard the euphemisms: Downsizing. Rightsizing. Me, I was part of a “reduction in force.”

I had been fired from other jobs. I got fired when I was younger and even snottier than I am now. I came late, left early, took long lunches. “Get the hell out of here!” my boss at the local supermarket yelled at my bratty 17-year-old self. “You’re worthless! A slacker!” I didn’t argue. He was right.

But I had never been “laid off.”

They say getting laid off is better than being “fired for cause.” You qualify for unemployment benefits. It looks better to future prospective employers (ha! as though those still existed). Getting laid off isn’t personal.

For me, that was the problem.

True, if there’s anything worse than having to have a job, it’s losing one. Once you’re on the way out the door, the details of how it goes down don’t really matter. You don’t know how you’re going to pay your bills. Will you lose your home? Will you end up living in your car? Those are the big questions.

Somehow, though, how they do it—how they fire you—matters.

I prefer the personal approach.

If there’s a moment that calls for honesty, it’s firing someone. If Lisa had called me into her office and told me: “Ted, it’s like this: I don’t like you. I can’t work with someone I don’t like. I used to trust you and your judgment, I used to appreciate what you did, but I’ve changed my mind. It’s over. You’re fired. Go home,” I still would still have had that hole-in-your-stomach feeling for the next few months. But I would have respected her.

It would have been personal. Honest.

Instead, I got Carol from HR.

It wasn’t Carol-from-HR’s fault. She did what she was told to do, no doubt by someone in Cincinnati who had never so much as laid eyes on me or the other seven people sitting around the table in the conference room, staring at the thick pile of documents in the E.W. Scripps folder she had handed us. Elsewhere, at other Scripps-owned companies around the country, similar meetings were being held. I wondered: were they simultaneous? You know, to allow for different time zones?

Scripps is a cheap company. The previous year, a perfect employee evaluation earned a Scripps worker a four-percent raise. Next came a pay freeze, and with it a lie: a pledge not to lay anyone off. The severance offer was consistent with their previous tightwaddery: four weeks pay.

Whatever.

“The sooner you get the severance agreement signed and sent to me,” Carol repeated, “the sooner you’ll get paid.” I flipped through the lengthy document. There was no way I could sign it. Among the provisions: I could never work for another media company the rest of my life.

If I’d signed it, writing this column would be a breach of contract.

For a lousy four weeks of severance.

There was a deadline by which to sign. As it approached, Carol emailed me. We talked on the phone, and again when I came into the office to pick up my personal items. I told her about the media company provision. Would they delete it? “It’s a reduction of force,” she replied. “We can’t change it.”

I had discussed it with several lawyers. One said it was so breathtakingly overreaching that no judge would enforce it in a court of law. “But a ‘reduction of force’ isn’t a legal term,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything. You can delete that section if you want to.”

She refused.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “we wouldn’t enforce that part.” Sure.

She seemed surprised that I didn’t trust them.

Six months later, Scripps bought the Travel Channel for $181 million.

(Ted Rall is working on a radical political manifesto for publication this fall. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Obama Revives Clinton’s Disastrous Triangulation Strategy

“It was Bill Clinton who recognized that the categories of conservative and liberal played to Republican advantage and were inadequate to address our problems,” President Obama wrote in his book The Audacity of Hope. “Clinton’s third way…tapped into the pragmatic, non-ideological attitude of Americans.”

Clinton’s “third way” was “triangulation,” a term and strategy invented by his pollster Dick Morris. Triangulation is a candidate’s attempt to position himself above and between the left and the right. A Democrat, Clinton insulated himself from Republican attacks by appropriating many of their ideas.

Obama is even more of a triangulator than Clinton.

Triangulation can work for candidates in the short term. Clinton got reelected by a landslide in 1996. (It failed, though, for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004.) But triangulation hurts parties, which sell an ideological point of view. Clinton worked so hard to out-Republican the Republicans that he forgot he was a Democrat-. He also forgot that Democratic voters expected to see liberal policies.

Clinton’s greatest achievements ended up being Republican platform planks: free trade deals like NAFTA and the WTO, welfare reform, balancing the federal budget on the backs of the poor and working class.

By the way, Dick Morris is now a Republican. Maybe he always was.

Because of Clintonian triangulation, the liberal base of the Democratic Party saw the 1990s as a squandered opportunity: eight years of unprecedented economic expansion with not one new social program, not even national healthcare, to show for it. They got the message: voting Democratic doesn’t guarantee Democratic policies. Unenthused, liberals stayed home or voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Liberal disgust for triangulation (they called it “selling out”) sufficiently reduced Al Gore’s margin of victory to allow George W. Bush to steal Florida and the national election. It took the Democrats six years to begin to recover.

Obama ran as a centrist. It would come as little surprise if he were governing as one.

But he’s not a moderate president.

Obama is a Republican.

A right-wing Republican. Thanks to triangulation gone wild.

In his first year Obama chose to continue numerous Bush Administration policies, many of which originated in the far extreme wing of the GOP. Each of the following asterisks represents a broken campaign promise:

Keeping the Guantánamo torture camp open*

Continuing the war against Iraq*

Expanding the war against Afghanistan

Renewing the USA Patriot Act*

No-string bank bailouts

Continuing “military commission” kangaroo trials*

Reserving the right to torture*

Continuing the NSA’s “domestic surveillance” program of spying on innocent Americans’ emails and phone calls*

It took over a year, but Obama can finally point to two legislative achievements: healthcare reform and reducing private banks’ role in the issuance of student loans. The student loan bill, though a step in the right direction, is liberal but too modest. Student loans ought to be replaced by grants. Ultimately, universities and colleges will have to be nationalized.
Obama’s revamp of healthcare, on the other hand, goes too far, perverting the liberal desire to provide healthcare for all Americans into a transfer of wealth from poor to rich that the hard right never dreamed of.

Buying into the classic, flawed, American assumption that a bad system can’t get worse (ask the Iraqis and Afghans), ObamaCare entrusts 30 million new customers, to the tune of roughly ten grand a year each, to the tender mercies of private insurance companies.

ObamaCare pours hundreds of billions of dollars, some from taxpayers, the rest from poor people, into the gaping coffers of giant corporations. Once people find themselves paying even more for visits to the same crappy doctors and hospitals they can’t afford now, they’ll hold the Dems responsible at the polls. If Republicans stopped to think, they’d love it.

And if Democrats stopped to think, they’d hate it.

Most Americans, and almost all liberal Democrats, want socialized medicine. Like they have in the rest of the world. Failing that, they were willing to settle for single-payer. When Obama let it be known that Mr. Audacity was going to lead as anything but, they prayed for a “public option.” What they got: zero.

Actually, less than zero: We were better off before. Taxes will go up for the already insured. For those about to be forcibly insured, they’ll have to pay more. And here’s the kicker: not only will the insurance companies be making higher profits at our expense, so will the federal government.

The Congressional Budget Office, invariably described in pieces like this as “the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office,” projects that the U.S. Treasury will come out ahead by $130 billion over 10 years.

Deficit negativity helped score votes among Democratic deficit hawks in Congress. But again, think about it: If the healthcare bill is making a profit for the U.S. government, where is that $130 billion coming from?

Correct: you and me. Our taxes will be higher than they should be, our health benefits will be less.

Obama, the media and many of us have forgotten what the problem was in the first place. Healthcare costs were too high. Thanks to this monster of a bill, they’ll go even higher.

The government should not make a profit off sick people.

Even the Republicans wouldn’t propose a tax this regressive.

Now Obama is echoing Sarah Palin, right-winger-turned-Tea-Partier. “Drill, baby, drill!” says the president, guaranteeing oil-soaked beaches decades after he has retired. It’s a terrible policy for the environment, won’t lower gas prices by one red penny, and will further turn off liberal Democrats.

Democrats will lose seats in Congress this fall. It may already be too late for Democrats to keep the White House in 2012. But if they continue to follow the Clinton-Obama triangulation strategy, they could destroy themselves for years to come. They might even expose the overall bankruptcy of our two-party pseudo-democracy.

(Ted Rall is working on a radical political manifesto for publication this fall. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

What Lefties Could Learn from The Party of No

“Damn! I wish I was a man,” sang folksinger Cindy Lee Berryhill in the 1980s. Me, I wish I was a Republican.

Conservatives dress frumpy, are all white and bland and suburbany, and don’t know much about history. But they have more fun than liberals. They stick together. And they fight for what they believe in (or, more often, they fight against what they’re against).

Right-wingers are tough.

Why can’t left-wingers be tough? Tough feels right. More importantly, tough works. Tough wins.

So here’s a toast: to guts, glory, and the Party of No. May we learn from them.

Consider where the GOP was ages and ages ago—OK, this is almost embarrassing to say—in November 2008. Republicans had lost control of both houses of Congress. Six months later, they were still in trouble, reeling from the defection of Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. The GOP, Jonathan Capehart wrote in The Washington Post, was in crisis. “[It] hasn’t coalesced around any ideas that weren’t born in the Reagan years. It hasn’t been able to muster the kind of galvanizing policy positions that made the Contract with America a rallying point for Republicans to go toe to toe with President Clinton in the 1990s. And it’s still in search of a leader…While the party isn’t over for Republicans, it’s getting there.”

What a difference a year of holding firm—and Democratic wankery—makes.

By January 6, 2010, The New York Times reported that Obama and the Democrats were “facing a shifting and perilous political environment that could have big implications for this year’s midterm elections and his own agenda.”

Healthcare is a lose-lose: If it fails, Obama won’t have a single major legislative achievement to his credit by this fall. If it passes, the details Democrats have managed to keep secret—high deductibles, co-pays, mandated payments to private insurers—will cost them in the midterm elections and possibly in 2012.

Dems are also taking hits for the financial bailouts—ironically, since the first round of banker giveaways began under Bush. But Americans have short memories. And no one is buying Obama’s argument that 20-plus percent underemployment rate would have been even worse without the bailouts.

Going into the 2010 midterm election season, right-wingers are fired up by the Tea Party and their thinly-disguised contempt for the fact that a black guy is in the White House. Liberals, on the other hand, couldn’t possibly be less motivated to serve as the Democratic Party base. They see healthcare as a sellout to insurers, hate the bailouts, and are disgusted by Obama’s decision (advertised in 2008, but Americans have short memories, dontcha know) to expand the war against Afghanistan. They won’t turn out to vote. As things look now, November 2010 will be a rout.

Capehart was right: the Republicans didn’t have any new ideas.

They didn’t need any.

Voters who back a losing party are angry. But they are realistic. They know their guys are in the minority. They only expect their representatives to do one thing: obstruct the other party as much as possible.

Which is exactly what the Republicans, led by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, have done. They have driven Democrats crazy.

As The New York Times put it: “Republicans are monolithically against the health care legislation, leaving the president and his party executing parliamentary back flips to get it passed, conservatives revived, liberals wondering what happened.”

The “party of no,” as liberal commentators slagged the GOP, is unified in its opposition to what it calls big-government, but is in reality opposed to anything the Democrats want. Which is just the way Republican voters like it.

“Their goal,” said Senate Democratic whip Richard Durbin of Illinois,” is to slow down activity to stop legislation from passing in the belief that this will embolden conservatives in the next election and will deny the president a record of accomplishment.”

Is that supposed to be criticism?

Sounds to me like they’re making the most of their 41 percent control of the Senate. Sounds to me like they’re giving Republican voters a reason to support them.

During the early years of the Bush regime, the Senate was split 50-50. One can’t help admire the unity of today’s 41-vote minority Republicans to the passive wimpdom of the 50-vote Senate Democrats of 2001-2002. Bush got everything he wanted: his invasion of Afghanistan, legalized torture, Guantánamo, the USA-Patriot Act, tax cuts for the wealthy, the build-up to the Iraq War. Democrats never held as few seats as Republicans hold now—yet they never lifted a finger to slow down Bush’s agenda.

Finally, consider the results. Cowardly Bush-era Dems lost seats in 2002 and 2004. Balls-to-the-wall Obama-era Republicans will almost certainly gain in 2010.

What’s the point of being a Democrat? When they lose, they let the other side have their way. When they win, they do the same.

Democrats will soon have another chance to redeem themselves—as a minority party.

Damn! I wish I were a Republican.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.”)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL