Corporations Share Blame for Job Losses

I did not share the sense of outrage that employees cost more to companies because of wrongful-firing litigation expressed in the article, “How Employer Fears of Wrongful-Firing Cases Eliminate Jobs” (July 21).

The story is written from the perspective of the plantation owner who finds that the uppity ideas of his “employees” are costing him money.

Naturally, these people (the employees) are just harming themselves, since the result will be less hiring. It kind of makes the corporate megalomaniac in all of us pine for more arbitrary days, when discrimination was rife and considered good for business.

The article states: “ . . . white men under 40 (sigh) have few rights in this area (ability to fire because of race, gender, etc.).”

There was certainly some justification for writing about the RAND study, but the reporter might have been less sympathetic to its conclusion, which is that the employment situation is going to get really bad if juries continue to award damages against arbitrary termination.

Maybe this study is intended to explain away the massive layoffs resulting from bad corporate real estate investments, union busting and corporate relocations to avoid U.S. labor and environmental protection laws.

Certainly, more jobs have been lost because of those actions on the part of corporate management than to litigious, wrongfully fired employees. The article, and the RAND study as cited, stubbornly overlook these details.

KURT MACKIE

Santa Monica