This and what Elon Musk did keep getting me struck by how little protection workers in the US have. Fired on a whim. But so do remember when working at American companies all the horror stories we heard about how our colleagues working in America got treated.
It became these “did you hear the latest crazy thing they did in the US office?”
I am not saying this to dump on America but hopefully to get people to demand better. If this is how people want their work life that is fine, but I hope people realize it doesn’t have to be like this.
What is actually pretty bad corporate culture has been normalized IMHO.
If you publicly trash your company (externally or just broadly internally) in other countries you’re saying you won’t be fired? Or face some discipline?
There's a lot of nuance as usual. Firing you over provably true statements or things you said strictly as a private individual can have harsher consequences for the company (you can be let go but they'd need to pay a pretty heavy severance)
I am not a lawyer, but I'd expect you'd need to be revealing company secrets, or have a public speaking position in the first place (e.g. you work for PR) and your declarations make you unfit for the job, or leave proofs that your goal was to damage the company, to be in a position as weak as in the US.
imagine otherwise how tough it would be to do political or ideological activism on your private time.
Use the example in the article. You basically write a letter to your fellow employees saying (I’ll paraphrase) “im outta here because the talents and ideas that made this place successful are gone”.
Can you do that in Europe and face no consequences?
> "He was fond of a line from the Persian poet Rumi, who said, “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” Playing off that line, Chaudhri wrote, “Sadly, rivers dry out, and when they do, you look for a new one."
No, an employer wouldn't be in a great position firing an employee about a reflexion on a poem, that was used to explain his motivation drying out. To be clear, the employer would face the consequences.
More precisely, in Europe firing someone has consequences for the company. So they would need rather more motivation to do that than an artfully worded leaving email.
I really enjoy that it’s basically impossible for my company to fire me on a whim (at least it’ll be a multi month process that you can see coming months away).
I can be openly critical to my boss, or leadership, or mess up in general and recover my good graces without constantly worrying that my job and life depend on it.
That said, we have to work with one another, so it’s in all our interests to keep a good relationship.
It became these “did you hear the latest crazy thing they did in the US office?”
I am not saying this to dump on America but hopefully to get people to demand better. If this is how people want their work life that is fine, but I hope people realize it doesn’t have to be like this.
What is actually pretty bad corporate culture has been normalized IMHO.