I can’t give more approval for this woman, she handled everything so well.
The backstory is that Cloudflare overhired and wanted to reduce headcount, rightsize, whatever terrible HR wording you choose. Instead of admitting that this was a layoff, which would grant her things like severance and unemployment - they tried to tell her that her performance was lacking.
And for most of us (myself included) we would angrily accept it and trash the company online. Not her, she goes directly against them. It of course doesn’t go anywhere because HR is a bunch of robots with no emotions that just parrot what papa company tells them to, but she still says what all of us wish we did.
(Warning, if you’ve ever been laid off this is a bit enraging and can bring up some feelings)
Basically in a nutshell, if they can claim it’s “performance reasons”, they likely wouldn’t have to pay her a severance if that was part of the contract, and there’s a chance she wouldn’t get unemployment insurance either.
I’m in the US and I’m not even 100% sure how much unemployment the company is liable for paying, but I know it’s a common strategy for any employer to abuse you into quitting on your own so they don’t have to pay it.
If she’s laid off, she gets some support until she finds a job elsewhere. If they admit that, then she wins justice rather than letting them get away with theft.
This is probably why these goons were sent in with zero data. They’re probably telling the truth that they don’t have these mystical “metrics and data points.”
It’s as she said: company hires a bunch of people, probably makes a bunch of promises to them, and then decides they don’t want to pay for them.
These are the kind of sociopaths that can justify just abandoning animals they’re tired of, and society rewards them for it through profits.
Here in Europe being fired “for just cause” does not impact unemployment benefits but does require quite the standard of proof (it’s can’t be just done on “your performance evaluation was not high enough”, and the company has to, for example, prove that somebody stole from it) but they can then avoid paying compensation. Also firing without just cause (i.e. laying off) is not generally possible outside the trial period unless in exceptional circumstances (say, the company has provenly been losing money and hence is firing a fraction of its employees).
This does vary from country to country and is part of the basic employment law, so in places with strong Unions it’s even more strict.
So this kind of situation in this video does not apply because to fire for cause the burden of proof is on the company, not the employee: she cannot be just fired “for cause” merelly because the company claims the underperforms.