Should Democrats fight to change the way removed employees are made to leave the workplace?

[Ken Burch]

It seems to me that Democrats could get a lot of resonance in raising the issue of "Separation with dignity" in the American workplace.

In many businesses now, people who are removed from their jobs(even if it was part of a mass layoff and had nothing to do with their own job performance) are given fifteen minutes to clear out their desks if their fired, then marched out, in the middle of the workday, IN FRONT OF THEIR CO-WORKERS, surrounded by armed guards as if they were criminals.

Seems to me we should work to challenge this practice or bar it legislatively and that doing so might get us a lot of new supporters.

Obviously, we should also be fighting to reduce the number of economic casualties in this society, but isn't the concept of a "Termination With Dignity" law something we should address?

It's not as if, unless we're talking about a senior executive who was caught raping an employee or embezzling from the company, anyone who loses their job actually DESERVES to be emotionally traumatized on their way out the door. If you just lose the job for an ordinary screw-up, losing the job should be punishment enough. If you're downsized, you shouldn't be intentionally shamed in any way at all.

And on the level of physical safety, I suspect that the "drumming them out" thing probably leads to a fair amount of workplace shootings, since the degree of trauma and degradation involved in that practice could easily push people over the edge.

What do people here think about the idea of taking this on?