I was fired in the mail. A registered letter. Another time I got fired with a one-line email. Yet another the chief of staff phoned me: I have bad news, he told me … I was waiting for you, I answered. Once it was a friend, who worked in the same company, who warned me: “Don’t you know that someone comes in your place? Come on, I thought they told you ”. Layoffs are all bad. I am a wound. A rejection.
They open a void to you, not only existential, but practical: will I be able to go on? And in that void you can fall or learn to fly, find a new job. This is to say not that I am a lover of the subject but that I know it well enough. And when I read that the government intends to ban layoffs via whatsapp and Teams or Zoom, in short via video call, I wonder: is that the problem? The technological platform we use to communicate? Having said that every oral communication must be followed by a written one so that the dismissal is valid and can be challenged by the worker. What exactly are we talking about? In the United States at the beginning of the 20th century they started using pink slips, hence the term pink slip, to indicate layoffs: but it is not that the chromatic pleasantness made that passage less painful.
Sure, the video of the boss calling a video meeting and saying: if you’re here it’s because you’re one of the guys we fired, it’s brutal. But the medium is not the problem. The tools to communicate are children of the times in which we live, and sometimes the inability to use them, a certain digital illiteracy, is among the causes of the dismissal. If I were the Minister of Labor I would rather focus on how to strengthen the digital skills of millions of workers in the balance, on how to extend their working lives in a world that has changed so quickly and seems to condemn entire generations to premature obsolescence. Is it so difficult to understand that work defends itself by investing in people?
.