It's payback time

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thursday August 02, 2001

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/uctr/20010802/cm/it_s_payback_time_1.html

IT'S PAYBACK TIME

By Ted Rall

Recession, Bad Bosses and the Art of Sabotage

DAYTON, Ohio -- The weak will never inherit the Earth, but they just might
blow it up on the way out.

As hundreds of thousands of Americans find themselves downsized,
right-sized, laid off and plain old fired during this latest economic
meltdown, some of them are getting even.

"I have been loyal to the company in good times and bad times for over 30
years," read an anonymous note to the president of a New Jersey-based
chemical company. "I was expecting a member of top management to come down
from his ivory tower to face us with the layoff announcement, rather than
sending the kitchen supervisor with guards to escort us off the premises
like criminals. You will pay for your senseless behavior."

Pay they did: The downsized/right-sized/laid-off/fired ex-information
management systems manager deleted his former employer's inventory and
personnel files from the comfort of his newly unaffordable home, causing
estimated damages of up to $20 million. The sabotage was so extensive that
the company had to cancel its IPO.

"I don't recall at any time in history, and I've been in this for 30 years,
where the degree of destruction was quite as high," employment attorney
Linn Hinds, whose corporate clients are closing factories and sending their
erstwhile workers to the fiscal hereafter, tells The New York Times.

Only in America would executive arrogance push a $186,000-a-year employee
into Bolshevism. God bless America!

It's been too long coming, but American corporations are finally beginning
to get what they deserve for treating their workers like equipment. Whether
they're hacking into data files or stealing their own impromptu severance
packages -- according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, 6
percent of gross corporate revenues are stolen by disgruntled workers --
ex-employees are striking back at companies that force them to work unpaid
overtime, without benefits, in cramped cubicles, until their
overcompensated bosses let them go with little or no severance.

Like the Diggers and Luddites before them, these heroic figures understand
that government is no longer in the business of protecting workers from
rapacious bosses. In a world where CEOs aren't stoned to death for
collecting raises at the same time they're letting the people who do the
real work go, justice is something you get for yourself.

Not everyone who gets laid off has a legitimate grudge. If a business isn't
doing well, if its executives set dignified examples by slashing or
eliminating their own pay, if they give workers several months notice of
problems so they can begin looking for new jobs, and if they issue generous
-- certainly not worth less than six months' pay -- severance checks, the
unlucky unemployed should say their farewells, forget their passwords and
move on quietly. You're not getting even, after all, unless you've been
done wrong.

But companies that rely on such Gestapo tactics as security guards and curt
notices of dismissal, those who cut you a two-week check or none at all,
and particularly those whose senior executives continue to collect
seven-figure paychecks for their services as failed managers, deserve
anything they get. In that situation, not only is there nothing unethical
about deleting a few vital files or diverting petty cash, it is an affront
to decency for you not to do so.

Corporate America has been violating labor laws and basic rules of civility
as long as it has because countless millions of broken-hearted workers have
let themselves get tossed out with the morning's trash by incompetent thugs
who lined their pockets with the fruits of their suffering. The more that
victims of corporate greedheads hit them in their bottom lines, the more
civilized the next round of layoffs will be. It may be a free market out
there, but laissez-faire is a French phrase for anarchy.

"(Dismissed workers') main concern," asserts labor lawyer Jonathan Alpert,
"is figuring out how to get their lives together, not masterminding some
sort of retaliation."

Let's work on that.

(Ted Rall, author of the new graphic novel "2024" and cartoon collection
"Search and Destroy," is based in New York.)