“If you’re on this video call, you’re fired.” Do you remember this phrase? It was pronounced last December by the CEO of the fintech Better.com, when he decided to ‘kick it’ live to the 900 employees who were watching him at the time through the Zoom video conferencing application.
And it is that, since teleworking has become widespread, the number of ‘situations to forget’ in terms of dismissals has only skyrocketed (Not that a dismissal is any memory to treasure, but you know what we mean).
Recently, other startups like Booking and Peloton have joined this list.
Booking fires 2,700 employees and offers them ‘scare or death’
Yesterday, at 9 in the morning Spanish time, the CEO of Booking.com —Glenn Fogel— laid off almost all of its customer service employees: 2,700 jobs around the world, from Spain to South Korea, passing through the US, Thailand or Singapore.
And he did it, to make matters worse, through a pre-recorded videoa detail that the Reddit user ‘TheSnitcher’, one of those fired, does not value very positively:
“It’s just one more thing to keep in mind when you’re watching his fancy Super Bowl ad.”
The user clarifies that you cannot publish the video or its transcript because the contract includes “a kind of confidentiality clause” and because he would have to take screenshots of his internal communication platform, Workrplace.
Those fired employees They will not, in principle, join the ranks of the unemployed: they have been offered to join Majorelthe subcontractor to which most of the tasks carried out by Booking until now will be outsourced (although they will still retain two of their own customer service centers in Amsterdam and Manchester).
But that does not reassure many of the affected employees: accepting the new job, the working conditions will only be maintained for the first 6 months, after which they may be bouncing from one customer service to another, or even being relocated to other countries (even in others with lower salaries than the current ones).
The alternative doesn’t seem particularly beneficial, either.: Refusing to accept the new job could result in the loss of Booking severance packages. And, as ‘TheSnitcher’ explains:
“If you don’t agree, quit or face disciplinary dismissal — which is pretty much the same thing — unless you have the time and resources to sue a billion-euro company located in… — who could have.” Guess what—Luxembourg!”
Other company
Around the same time, exercise machine startup Peloton, so popular during the pandemic, also notified its employees of a similar number of dismissals (2,800)shortly before the video conference to welcome the newly appointed CEO, Barry McCarthy.
The company’s lack of tact and/or foresight caused the dismissed workers to enter said videoconference en masse, and McCarthy had to ‘lighten up’ his greeting message in the face of the barrage of negative comments that began to pour into the chat.
“The math just didn’t add up and the status quo was unsustainable,” McCarthy assured in an internal email, a couple of days earlier, trying to explain the company’s restructuring after losing 75% of its market valuation.