Cuyahoga County Lays Off Workers Via Plainclothes Detectives

When you get laid off there are people you expect to see there handing you your pink slip. Who do you imagine giving you the bad news? Maybe it is a human resources staffer who has been hardened by the fact that she has had to deliver 50 other notices today. Maybe it is the interoffice mail personnel, giving you a sealed white envelope instead of your normal manila with the reusable string seal. Or, maybe you picture your boss calling you into his office to give you the notice in person. No matter what picture you have in your mind it probably does not involve law enforcement professionals coming to your door, unannounced, in order to give you a layoff notice at home, yet this is exactly what happened to eight workers in Ohio.

These workers were all civil servants for the county of Cuyahoga, which is one of the largest counties in the state of Ohio. But, lets go back to the beginning.

In order to stay in the black, Cuyahoga County recently decided to let go of 33 of its workers from the county fiscal office based in Cleveland. The majority of those 33 workers were in the office that day, and were simply given the news there. The other eight workers were, for various reasons, not in the office that day. Some of them were on vacations and the others had simply called out sick for the day.

Since they were not in the office their employer decided that the best course of action was to send a pair of plainclothes detective to each home in order to deliver the layoff notices in person. Apparently the county thought that the layoffs were so urgent that they simply could not wait for the staffers to come back to the office before letting them go.

As you can image the former employees were shocked to be treated in such an impersonal manner by their employers. One laid off worker, who wished not to be identified because she feared that her statements may have a negative impact on her prospects of finding a new job told a reporter for The Plain Dealer, a local newspaper, that, “These are men who serve warrants to people.” Her comments underscore the level of anxiety that even a law abiding person can feel when they are presented with a piece of official documentation by a law enforcement professional. Given that this is the way that people are treated when they need to appear in court for committing a criminal offense, it can be a bit of a shock.

Of course, the county says that it had its reasons for doing things that way. Elise Hara, the Human Resources Director for the county, told the same local reporter that her motives were pure, she did not want the employees to be embarrassed, “I was trying to prevent people from coming back not knowing they’d been laid off.” She cited not wanting employees to find out that they were sans a job when their badges were deactivated.

Apparently, the idea of simply not deactivating them until after notice was given did not occur to her.