How to can employees in a humane and deceitful manner
Unemployment is a national disease, and I just want you to know that I feel your pain, employers of America.Hey, anyone can sympathize with out-of-work citizens trying to pay the bills and shelter the family. It takes a truly great humanitarian to bleed for the captains of industry, the bazillionaires and kabillionaires and Scrooge McDucks, the affluent few who have been forced to fire thousands and/or switch their private jet fuel to unleaded. If that's not a code-orange embarrassment at the private airfield, I don't know what is!Because I feel the pain of the Jabba-the-Hut-sized business owners of America, I wish to assist them with one of their most dire needs: how to can employees in a humane and deceitful manner.Just as labeling your love is a challenge, trimming the payroll can make even the most limber-tongued entrepreneur/supervillain reach for the thesaurus. With apologies to pink slip, discharge, disemploy, dismiss, dispatch, decruitment, reduce redundancies, show the door, give someone their walking papers, make a change in the org chart, and career change opportunity, here's a handy list of terms for the unkindest cuts of all.downsizingHistory: Predicting the implosion of the auto industry, this word first referred (in the seventies) to making smaller cars without sacrificing interior space. As the frequently-upsized Oxford English Dictionary tells us, the current meaning was first found in 1990: "Communicators were facing tough times on their jobs. Many were getting downsized and outplaced."Pros: It's no longer super-euphemistic; everyone knows what it means.Cons: Everyone knows what it means. For a more effective cloaking of reality, see next term.
rightsizingHistory: This dates from at least 1987 and sounds jokey, but it's no joke that some businesses really use the term: "SET adopts 'right-sizing' strategy; asks 60 to leave."Pros: Sounds like a good thing, if it referred to pants. In fact, RightSize is also the name of a diet shake.Cons: Implies that soon-to-be-cut employees are like unsightly love handles on the flabby company frame. And speaking of exercise metaphors…getting fitHistory: Getting fit is usually associated with bulging muscles, toned abs, and legs that go all the way down to the floor. But with the econo-meltdown, some not-so-frank folks at Yahoo have had to let a lot of people go, and when you spread that kind of misery, it needs to be applied with a rounded, childproof, butter knife of an expression, as displayed in a leaked memo: "…as we look ahead and to position us for success in 2009, we're continuing the work already underway to get fit as an organization: actively looking for ways to make process and structural changes to our business that will allow us to work more efficiently, with more scale."Pros: Very creative. Will overheat all but the most powerful decoder rings.Cons: If you actually said this to an employee's face, the employee, by law, is justified in applying the Five-point Palm Exploding Heart Technique that got such rave reviews in Kill Bill.
