How can we defend 'Last in, First out' as fair?I was listening to a radio report recently about an industrial dispute at a lift company. (I’m not sure whether the description of the strike ‘escalating’ was deliberately tongue in cheek!). Workers were striking because the company had not used the criterion of ‘Last in, First out’ when making employees redundant despite this apparently being the recommendation of the Labour Court. It got me thinking about how on earth we could ever have accepted this as a reasonable way to decide on redundancies when it is so blatantly inequitable. We certainly wouldn’t accept the hiring of someone on such an irrelevant criterion so why the firing? If we believe in fairness and merit it seems to me that we need to have a scoring system of relevant criteria for the job in question and keep the people who do the job best. If this is someone who has been recently hired so be it. Why should longevity in a job be the sole decider of whether you keep that job? Add a CommentYour comment will appear once it has been approved. |