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Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job

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Re: Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job

#281

Post by timv »

hueving wrote: post #208
KyeRussell wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proponents of a largely deregulated labour market love talking about France. As someone working in Australia—a country with labour laws that are more sane than France (and definitely the U.S.)—instantly bringing up France just tends to stink of a false dichotomy and a line of rhetoric from people that try to justify the U.S.'s unjustifiably unfair labour laws. I suggest that people who aren't familiar with Australia'…

>Regardless of your view on labour laws I think most people agree on this. Not if the other option was China shutting down a bunch of Marriott hotels and hundreds of employees losing their jobs instead.

But that wasn't the other option. They could have fired the executive who was responsible for managing and training the staff (who clearly failed to do so) or the executive that implemented a customer support system that allowed staff to like tweets that could cause significant damage to the company.

Or they didn't have to fire anyone - it's not like China actually gets to see employment records for random staff in Omaha.

Re: Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job

#282

Post by AnthonyMouse »

falcolas wrote: post #176
cylinder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real story is he has no employment rights because he's in America and he's "at will." They can dismiss him because they don't like his lunch selection that day and he has no rights. That's at will employment. This type of situation plays out all over the country everyday.

In my opinion, there is a bigger problem with at will employment than being able to be fired at any time. If your employer wants to change your contract in almost any fashion, their continued employment of you is considered to be sufficient “consideration” for the change. They want to put you on call? No extra pay required. Change you to the night shift? You still have a job, that’s sufficient. It’s an employee right…

> They want to put you on call? No extra pay required. Change you to the night shift? You still have a job, that’s sufficient.

How is it not? You can always threaten to quit if they don't give you a raise. The only way that doesn't work is if they can easily replace you with someone willing to work harder for less money.

And in that case that's what they're supposed to do. You would only be willing to quit if you had a better option that the person willing to do this job for less money apparently doesn't. So then they should get your job and you should go take the better job.

Re: Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job

#283

Post by timv »

yur83838 wrote: post #259
jliptzin wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you terminate employees because you need to save money (i.e. laying them off)?

yup, redundancies can be used to dismiss employees. The caveat is that you can't rehire for that role for a certain period of time. This is simply to avoid the problem of companies claiming random employees are no longer needed. It is not uncommon for smaller employers to fire a manager, and hire a new supervisor though. Same job - different title. I'm unsure if it's been challenged at the FWC - I doubt it would stan…

You also need to offer other options within the company if they exist.

So if you're reducing the number of staff employed to support "system A", but you have vacant positions supporting "system B", then you you need to offer those positions to any affected staff, or show why those employees would not capable of doing the new job.

Re: Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job

#284

Post by Rapzid »

corobo wrote: post #21

The meat of the story is that Omaha man worked for Marriott hotels on customer support. Their support system allows their agents to like tweets. The man appears to have inadvertently clicked like on a tweet while dealing with a large influx of support messages (due to a promo going on) thanking Marriott for listing Tibet as its own country which was a huge no-no due to Mariott's presence in China. Execs fire him as a…

I can't help but feel the real problem here is China. Those death threats and angry tweats were likely coming from China employed shills. Such a ticking time bomb the CPC.

Re: Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job

#285

Post by [deleted] »

cylinder wrote: post #54
corobo wrote: post #21

The meat of the story is that Omaha man worked for Marriott hotels on customer support. Their support system allows their agents to like tweets. The man appears to have inadvertently clicked like on a tweet while dealing with a large influx of support messages (due to a promo going on) thanking Marriott for listing Tibet as its own country which was a huge no-no due to Mariott's presence in China. Execs fire him as a…

The real story is he has no employment rights because he's in America and he's "at will." They can dismiss him because they don't like his lunch selection that day and he has no rights. That's at will employment. This type of situation plays out all over the country everyday.

[deleted]

Re: Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job

#286

Post by yorwba »

greglindahl wrote: post #260
yorwba wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you are a startup in France, with long-term employees, and suddenly you realize you screwed up, and you have to cut your expenses in half. You dismiss employees equivalent to half of your expenses on economic grounds, and after the appropriate notice period (1 month for employees with 6 months - 2 years tenure [1]) you now have half the expenses. If that's not fast enough, I doubt your startup would have survived f…

OK, no problem, I am convinced because Europe has tons of successful startups. That works great until the next time I am interviewed by French TV about why the EU doesn't have as many startups as Silicon Valley.

Surely at-will employment is not all it takes to suddenly have lots of successful startups. Otherwise the US would have a more spread-out distribution of startups, instead of the cluster in Silicon Valley.

When you do get interviewed by French TV, I hope you won't pretend like this is a single-cause issue with a simple fix.

Re: Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job

#287

Post by fiblye »

chrischen wrote: post #33
corobo wrote: post #21

The meat of the story is that Omaha man worked for Marriott hotels on customer support. Their support system allows their agents to like tweets. The man appears to have inadvertently clicked like on a tweet while dealing with a large influx of support messages (due to a promo going on) thanking Marriott for listing Tibet as its own country which was a huge no-no due to Mariott's presence in China. Execs fire him as a…

Yea it's weird I feel like liking the tweet should pale in comparison to whoever listed Tibet as its own country. Seems like the mistake was listing tibet as a country on the survey and they fired a guy just because he put attention to it by liking a tweet (and was thus used as a sacrifice). If I were China, I'd probably demand the firing of someone more consequential than a random minimum wage worker who had little…

The mistake was letting people who don't accept that Tibet is its own country send death threats to you and kowtowing to them. It's enabling their bullshit.

Re: Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job

#288

Post by realusername »

greglindahl wrote: post #218
realusername wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what perception of the country you have but it's not the Soviet Union you know, having financial issue is a valid reason to fire employees. The US is the only developed place without reasonable workers laws so it's more an exception than anything else.

In the US, we call this argument "Red Baiting". Sure, let's accuse our opponent of starving 10s of millions of people to death! When there's a financial problem, there are multiple differing opinions as to what's reasonable. But if you want to call the US the "only developed place without reasonable worker laws", you might want to consider Denmark. Because they don't have the opinion you're propagating.

Yeah but in Denmark they compensate with very high unemployment benefits paying up to 90% of your previous salary for up to 2 years (that's much higher than in France), I don't recall any of that in the US.

Re: Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job

#289

Post by ascorbic »

chrischen wrote: post #236
kodablah wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That depends if you think some Americans would be offended if you claimed Hawaii was its own country Of course not. They'd just ignore you. Not force you to suspend online sales to your 300 stores in the country. Why is there always someone willing to twist things into a pretzel in search of moral equivalence when it comes to China or Russia? There's no pot. There's no kettle. Using your leverage to force a company…

What they did was an economic sanction and it is something the US does engage in to further political goals. The US uses similar tactics to force countries to comply with US drug laws, punish Russia for invading Ukraine, as well as other less noble political goals. It’s often in the form of sanctions but can also be in the form of withholding aid from poor countries or embargoes. They do this to many central american…

Whatever your views on US foreign policy, I'm not really sure you can equate invading a country with liking a tweet or making a mistake on a web form.

Re: Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job

#290

Post by paradite »

Chinese citizen here. A few points that I want to make after reading some comments:

1. I would be personally offended if anyone or any organization lists Tibet as a country.

2. Lots of Chinese people would be offended too by this.

Reasons for 1 and 2:

- It is a piece of wrong information

- The wrong information directly contradicts what is considered basic knowledge in China

- That basic knowledge happens to be on the topic of sovereignty

- Chinese people care a lot of sovereignty (see https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/issues/6006)

Why do Chinese people care so much about sovereignty? Culture and history.

It is the same question as:

- Why do Americans care so much about freedom of speech, democracy and race equality?

- Why do Japanese people care so much about respect and etiquette?

Now addressing the obvious issue, that some people support the idea of Tibet becoming independent and they should be free to express their ideas. Yes, they are free to say so, but there are two things to keep in mind:

- Opinions are not facts, you can support whatever you want, but don't say it as a fact like "Tibet is a country as of 24 March, 2018." That is not the right thing to do.

- If you choose to freely express your opinions or spread false information, you will face consequences for them. For example, a PR firm would likely tell you that expressing such opinions would results in negative brand image and boycott in China. In addition, saying something like that in China would result in more serious consequences. You might not like it, but that is beyond your control and you should be aware of that.

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