Coalition of Franchisee Associations

April 5, 2023

Who's Zooming Who?

The methods McDonald's Corp. used to communicate its downsizing and termination decisions have gotten a surprising amount of press coverage. I'm sure management was expecting zero, instead they got tons.

But why did they decide to make these announcements virtually? While I've never been involved in any firings or downsizing I've heard stories and it seems to, as Jonathan Maze wrote, involve employees being ushered into a room with executives, given the bad news, escorted by security to their desk for housecleaning, and then ushered out the front door.

But this is a fairly public display and the other employees in the building can watch it all. Trends in the terminations would be obvious.

If most of the terminations are straight white males it will be apparent. If the trend is to terminate folks who lead alternative lifestyles the whispering would become intense. If the terminations are based on appearance or skin tone no one can ignore the obvious.

Done virtually, in an empty building, with the click of a mouse, any patterns in the terminations are unseen by the rest of the staff. Of course, management would never have to admit to these calculated decisions.

And in their public reports, they can claim anything that fits the DEI agenda.

Next time around maybe they'll just let ChatGPT do the dirty work.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good analysis. They dont want you to recognize that higher paid employees (replaced by low paid outside contractors) and those with years of experience are the ones being canned.

Cheaper, less benefits, less experience to object

Anonymous said...

Interesting take on the layoffs. By the way, Richard, the correct grammar is: "Who's zooming whom". "Whom" should be used when it is the object of a intransitive verb, in this case, "zooming".

Richard Adams said...

Thanks but we built this city on rock and roll and as such Aretha Franklin is our grammatical goddess. The title track to her 1985 comeback album was, "Who's Zoomin' Who?"
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