There’s a significant element to all this too that is significant, especially for the pay-cheque to pay-cheque living. America has fuck all of a wellfare state, if you get dismissed, regardless of whether you’ve done anything wrong, you are truly in the shit if you cannot get another position quickly.
I was really talking about what goes on while staff are under contract, which is the case with the TikTok staff who started this discussion oh-so-many posts ago. Sure, the employer can terminate the contract, as can the employee for that matter.
And the healthcare blackmail that employers have of course.
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Whatever the available legal reasons for dismissal may be, employees know that they merely need to tangle an employer up in egregious legal wranglings to involve them in VERY considerable expense. They know it’s cheaper for the employer to pay them to fuck-off.
It may have changed, and it’s inevitably different from state-to-state, but Sam was responsible for managing HR resources at Happy Egg’s US operation (CA based but operating in multiple states) for five years, and this was inevitably how their legal team advised dismissals be undertaken.
May depend on the level. Higher up people have that option, plebs who have a choice between food and lawyers probably don’t.
We are talking about a place where 62% of bankruptcies are due to ill health. Whilst Americans may find acceptance in this, often it is mostly due to pure ignorance. Prison sentencing, employment law all of these things are greedily off humanities beam.
Adding this as an amuse mind
Agree 100%
I have worked for a few US companies and have spent a good deal of time there.
Hire and fire is very common in the IT and networking markets. They almost view the employees as contractors hiring them for certain projects and letting them go at will. It’s an unwritten understanding that they could be fired at will and I didn’t see anyone who wanted to take the company to court.
They are very big on references and unlike the UK they will comfortably write a bad one so causing grief is uncommon.
Oh dear, have a few drinks to drown your sorrows Mel and just blame it on the jews 
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Had exactly this during Covid 2.
We were advised at a national level to not travel, and to work from home if at all possible.
My then boss actually said “Fuck that - I’m not paying you to have a holiday. You can take leave or not be paid.”
There was legal recourse butbit wouldn’t help at the time.
Speaker of the House suggests Trump payments for reparations for LA (typically a blue area) could be conditional on those Blue areas supporting Trumps call to raise the debt ceiling.
Waiting for woke fire retardant rants.
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I’m fascinated by how the stuff is supposed to work - the article isn’t hugely enlightening on the mechanism, and it’s still mostly water
Sounds like it disrupts the combustion chemistry (which is a fancy way of saying, less helpfully, that it stops stuff burning). The name implies that the active ingredient might be the “fertiliser type salts” - fertilisers commonly include phosphates. There’s some discussion of how fire retardants work here but it’s probably worth narrowing that down a long way a) to stuff which coats the fuel surface and b) to exclude organophosphates (I don’t think it would be responsible to dump large amounts of these in an uncontrolled way into the environment - particularly in somewhere like California where the residents can quickly become quite lawyered-up).
When I used to do theatre work we used to fireproof very large drapes by soaking them in solutions of borates. It didn’t take much and it was surprisingly effective. I saw the council fire officer test one or two by holding them in a lighter flame for maybe 20-30 seconds. They charred but as soon as the flame was removed they self-extinguished.
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I thought there was an explanation in the article when I read it the other day
Yep’ish
The exact formula of Phos-Chek is not public knowledge but the company has said in previous filings that the product is 80% water, 14% fertiliser-type salts, 6% colouring agents and corrosion inhibitors.
As for its color, the company said it is “a visual aid for pilots and firefighters alike.” After a few days of exposure to sunlight, the colour fades to earth tones, it said.
The retardant is typically sprayed around a wildfire on vegetation and land that is fire-prone to stop the flames from spreading to that area.
According to the US Forest Service, retardants “slow the rate of spread by cooling and coating fuels, depleting the fire of oxygen, and slowing the rate of fuel combustion as the retardant’s inorganic salts change how fuels burn.”
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The lad at the back has his parents are so embarrassing face on.
But possibly also a case of “Be careful what you wish for…”…
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