The Story of How Companies Fire People

※ The following piece is a purely original work of fiction that has nothing to do with any specific company or person. Occasionally a work of fiction may contain parts that resemble the real world, or depict characters who resemble actual people in the real world, but this is merely a case where, by the very nature of fiction, the created content happens to bear some resemblance to the real world. I hereby state that this piece is not an account of any specific company or individual in the real world, and that it is a purely original work of fiction by the author that has no connection whatsoever to anyone in the real world. In other words, this piece is pure fiction.

This is something that is currently unfolding, in real time, at a certain large IT company in Korea. Over the past two years or so, this company has pushed out nearly 2,000 people. And it didn’t push them out by pressing severance packages into their hands. The results were achieved mainly through tactics like making people feel miserable, reassigning them to completely different job functions, fixing annual raises at 2%, and keeping salaries at the lowest level in the industry. Naturally, the internal atmosphere of the company is not so great. Employees would openly write their résumés during work hours. People wondered how much worse things could possibly get, but…

Naturally, even more ominous news rang out. It was an announcement that one of the business divisions would be carved off and sold to a certain small-to-midsize company. Because the company had strongly denied this until then, the shock was all the greater for the employees who had trusted the company up to that point. Immediately, personnel transfers for the employees in that division were blocked. Severance pay was also set. The amount was a little over one million won per person. Compared to the year-end performance bonus the company had promised, it was an absurdly small sum. As grief and anger grew, some employees resolved to take action. Specifically, they would stage a protest at the group’s headquarters.

The employees took personal leave and gathered at the group’s headquarters building. There weren’t many of them to begin with, but since this was a company that had never had a union, from the employees’ point of view this amounted to an unprecedented, all-out move. The company’s response, however, was swift and sweeping. All of the protest participants were marked as absent without leave. How can it be absence without leave when they had taken leave? The method was simple. The leave-approval data for all the protest participants was changed back to “pending approval.” The message of this measure was also clear. “Your commute data, your HR data—whatever it takes, we can manipulate it at any time. If necessary, we will not shrink from any lawsuit.” Naturally, the resistance of the mere handful of employees scattered like a spring breeze.

And yet, even amid the turbulent waves of shock and terror, there were small dramas. No matter how we lump everything together under the single phrase “the company side,” it too is a collection of employees. There were bound to be minor moments of discord. The incident broke out when they were manipulating the leave-approval data of the protest participants. The HR team instructed the person in charge of the HR system to change the data immediately, but that person refused, citing that it went against their personal convictions. And they declared that if they were going to be pressured into committing illegal acts in this manner, they would rather resign. It was an unexpected act of resistance, but the response to it was resolute. “Whether you quit or not, the data will be changed.” In the end, someone else carried out the work instead, and the company’s will was done. As for what happened afterward to that system administrator who tried to hold on to their convictions, I do not know.

Stories of a company that once cried out that we were all one family selling off part of that family, or laying them off, have now become commonplace. In fact, it has long been the prevailing view of this era that people who believe such fine-sounding words no longer even deserve sympathy. But when, in that process, the company steps into the realm of illegality, it becomes a song with a different melody altogether. In any case, for an ordinary employee, starting a legal battle with the company is a destruction of daily life and a burden too heavy to bear. To that extent, the company side lightly crosses the line of legal compliance in its fight against employees. And this also sends shockwaves through the employees who function as part of the company. At that moment when I must cruelly confront the fact that an employee is a tool of the company and that the one who decides my fate is not me—what can I choose? It is truly a world in which it is hard even to utter a single word free of shame.