Ha! Or that's why they fired him. He'd been with them a long time and had worked his way up to a larger salary, so they'd save money by getting rid of him and hiring someone new whom they'd only offer them half what he was being paid, or they didn't want to have to pay his pension by letting him retire with them.
Granted those are techniques I tend to more associate with employment in the US, but I'm sure it happens in other countries too.
My father over the course of his career has lost two jobs that he'd been with 10 years or more, was well liked, and always received good performance reviews. He lives in an "At Will" state, though, so they didn't need a reason to fire him.

I own my own business in an "At Will" state. I'm glad I can get rid of ppl who don't fit with my business model. Those that do and are valued employees are treated as such. I use a variety of techniques to ensure I retain the good employees, including profit sharing, telecommuting, flex hours, bonuses and making sure they all take paid time off. I would hate to have to pay somebody just because they've been around for a while and are no longer performing - costs the business money and not fair to those employees that do perform well. And firing someone for not doing their jobs usually costs a fortune in legal fees.

I work for a big corp currently, though I am a fast-growing-little-corp kinda gal. I love everything about my job for the most part, but my company regularly 'restructures' which appears to mean, fire a slew of people, then invite half of them back at vastly less salary, vastly more restrictive options including huge things like location, starting all over with less vacation per year and more, just with a different title, where they end up doing what amounts to the same job, albeit some trivial shift in some area. I realize this saves the company lots of money, and I am all for being able to get rid of anybody you don't want, but the whole "let's just knock 25% of salary and 80% of vacation costs off all our longer-term people because we can" is wicked. I wouldn't make it illegal -- I am not a labor union sort in the slightest -- but I sadly recognize it as trading good-faith trust ethics for slight income benefit.

*




There is so much wrong with this, where to begin. Things people don't even question.


1. I weigh nearly 450# and I am a woman of just less than 5'6". Probably a fair guess that since he is a man he is both male and taller than me. He weighs 350#. Now, if I sit on the floor, I have a helluva time getting up again, true, but I can. And I can squat and bend to tie a shoe. I don't enjoy it nor does my heart, but I can do it. (I'd be smart enough to sit the kid up on something so I didn't have to.) If this man cannot tie a shoe, the issue is not because he is fat. If it's true, the issue is simply because he is not fit enough.


2. I am working on some health issues now (only related to my weight). When I was ketogenic and losing weight so I had energy, I would lift weights, go out and move cinder block and brick around my big garden and landscaping, and more. Stuff that I would have been seriously worked-out by when I weighed 250 never mind 350-450. Weight alone did not utterly disable me though it made me more cautious (for good reason). Lack of nutrition, particularly protein and good fats, is what disables me, measurably. To the degree I'm able to solve those parameters for a week+ running, my "fitness" seems to magically increase, cumulatively.

It isn't the fatness, it's the fitness. I know 350# women who can run a marathon and I know someone around 300# who uses a wheelchair because she is 'too fat.' It's about nutrition not about the fat cells.

Tons of lean people due to health issues caused by lousy diet, instead of getting fat, get a disease condition of one or more kinds. They are disabled by back pain and diabetes and high blood pressure. It wasn't a gift from the gods. They brought it on themselves as much as any fat person did, and likely through the same ignorant-oblivion. The results simply vary by the person.


3. Again even in readers there's this sort of assumption that if someone is very fat they are DOING SOMETHING EVERY DAY TO STAY THAT WAY. This is a complete lie, ok. They *might* be. But there is an equally good chance that short of ketogenic starvation and MAYBE NOT EVEN THEN, that person would only lose a certain amount of weight -- and this for all anybody knows, they may have already lost, and may be a great or evolving success story in fact! -- and probably not more.

And that person may be pulling off resisting temptation and hard-fighting neural biochemical triggers and willpowering through all of that. It is the big lie that "if you weren't DOing something to STAY that way you'd be thin" that is behind that snark.


4. It is EVERYONE'S responsibility that they got to wherever they are. If a person has any health issue whatever, if they are old and poor or lonely or whatever, there are always decisions that lead to that, and that doesn't mean they were bad decisions even, they may have been wonderful decisions (like to marry Anne, instead of Karen), but may have simply brought about an end result that is unfortunate (Anne dies 20 years earlier than Karen in this fiction and leaves her beloved husband mourning and living on Top Ramen in his apathy about continuing to breathe). Every bit of our reality experience was brought to us care of the decisions we have made, directly or indirectly, even they were innocent and/or wonderful decisions and/or "un"-decisions made by inattention and ignorance.

So the fact that someone happens to be fat and obviously made the decisions that got them that way, is in context a stupid thing to use as any kind of logic-leverage -- it exists only to move obesity from the lab setting of endocrinology into the armchair of guilt-based psychology, which IMO is like going to a doctor for a blood test and having him insist you join his cult.


5. Physiology influences psychology. And then physiology influences social response which influences psychology. Psychology then influences physiology. By the time someone is fat it's a cross-woven mass of gridlock stuffed with 'penalties and interest' impossible to decipher and impossible that any one factor is to blame at that point. Therapy's lovely, but most people I know with eating disorders and self-hate issues are Lean!! They won't be when they're 45 but they certainly are now. Sure psychology plays a part in everything. But once someone IS fat -- through whatever circumstance -- it is done. I don't think recognizing individual emotion issues should be construed to mean that eating, which is driven by biology mostly for most people, is a sign of emotion. Cows get fatter and lazier when they eat like us too, even when they get on perfectly well with their mothers.


Overeating is not obesity -- there is a profound inability to think with clarity with that one.

First, even if it was overeating that brought about obesity, most of the time that's driven by existing underlying physiology not gluttony so one might as well consider the eating behavior as much a body-process as high blood pressure.

Second, sometimes it wasn't overeating but rather, underprocessing which again, is a health issue not an eating issue.

Third, whether or not the first vs. second causation factor is true, once someone IS fat, that is the IS-NESS -- it doesn't require overeating to simply 'be' what you already are. Tons of people are obese and not only does eating less not lose any further weight off them, but often damages them, so it is IMPOSSIBLE for them to eat a 'proper' amount.

Sometimes eating X amount doesn't lose weight, and eating X-1 harms them and leads to even more weight.

PJ

I'm still sorting out thoughts on this, there are so many judgments about overweight people and their capabilities. Fixating on whether or not someone can perform a menial task. What about a person's cognitive abilities, skills and affinity for their work, whether the kids thrive under their care?

The lack of compassion and understanding for people who are overweight, for whatever reasons, is just astounding.

Why do so many people feel they need to control an overweight person in various ways or subject them to scrutiny?

I haven't become magically slender though I've been LC'ing for a long time; still overweight by most standards. And yet my work productivity, accomplishments, and focus increased dramatically when I gave up carbs and all the problems I had experienced. And yet people still see me as an overweight person and the slights are either subtle or overt from people who think they have the right to judge. - Sorry for the rant but there's so much of this kind of thing in the news lately.

Handicap placards, wheelchairs, etc.
Also it's an excuse to have a lack of physical activity, etc.

Calimatt, you are being offensive.

We cant have it both ways - if obesity becomes a "disability" then we're all going to have to pay. Who's at fault and who has to pay??? People say that its not their fault, but is it???? Obesity isnt quite the same as - for example cerebral palsy, downs syndrome, MS, birth defects......... It is and can be treatable, if the right food combinations are used, so is it fair that those who arent obese have to foot the bill??? and what about eating guide lines. Isnt it time they were a little more realistic, instead of the same old "low fat, calories in/out" mantra

I always remember when I was obese, a friend said to me that she had little sympathy for me cos it was self inflicted, unlike her sister who was born with thalidomide issues. At the time I was a bit put out, altho I knew she was right!

Jo xxx

Well we're all paying anyway.
Not that I think it helps to call it a disability -

but obesity IS like cerebral palsy, downs, birth defects, if the mother's nutrition was such that babies are born carb disabled with hormones already predisposed to store fat. And then fed fattening foods way before the age of reason and the ability to self inflict.

also there is no standard agreement on how to fix it that " is and can be treatable." That's why they sell gastric bypass. Not all treatments work for every single person. Remember the super low fat diet of the 80s which was later shown to make insulin resistance worse.

If we are to not pay for people who are self-inflicting, why not stop paying for treatment for the skinny sick also. Like not paying for statins when you could get the same results without medical treatment.

Hear hear!

Well... When I was obese and eating all my hearthealthywholegrains while avoiding arterycloggingsaturatedfat (those are all one word after all) my cognitive abilities WERE compromised, along with my physical abilities.

But why do you assume if someone is obese that they must be eating whole grains/high carbs etc.? Did everyone on this board who went LC become magically slender in a short period of time? I think not. People can become (and stay) overweight for many complex reasons, including thyroid and endocrine imbalances, medications, or genetic inheritance.

These kinds of judgments are toxic, a step away from obese = fat/stupid/lazy/unemployable.

I think realistically, they are not declaring obesity a disability out of some kind of altruistic greater compassion for the obese.

By declaring it something like that, massively more money pours in plus it gives actually leverage to force "treatments" on people and children who would normally avoid it... mandated consumers.

I agree that generally, my cousin Mark who was born with down syndrome just can't be compared to me, who was ridiculously healthy seemingly until I got hugely fat. Though I agree that for many people, issues are caused by genetics, by the womb, by early childhood, by upbringing. Then again we could lay everything from schizophrenia to alcoholism at that door, where does that stop?

Until our whole society is 'fat, sick and nearly dead' apparently. I'm willing to bet the quantity of people in rest homes versus three decades ago is a lot more and growing.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to decently address any subject related to obesity when it's tied to nutrition and nutrition is tied to the intentionally convoluted, polluted, distributed-network-of-subclinical-poisoning-and-malnutrition on a national level.

There is no good answer because all the avenues we have for applying any answers are either closed doors, roads to nowhere, or highways to hell.

Hmmn. Apparently cynicism makes me poetic.

PJ

Good post, rightnow/PJ.
I also think that the word "international" could have been used just as fittingly in place of "national."

Geez, I want to work for you!

Exactly. There's gold in them thar hills! I see this mirrored in the current pharmaceutical stranglehold on the practice of medicine in the US. What's wrong with you has to show up in a lab report, and it will only be treated by a patented drug. End of story. If that doesn't work for you, it's "all in your head" but we won't help you get therapy, you slacker.

For instance, no one questions (or least least, should not) the handicapped sticker for someone with MS. This is a physical illness with a known, if erratic, effect on someone's mobility.

Yet, we now have two modes of treatment; the steroid suppression of current medical practice, and the nutritional approach (recently published) by Dr. Wahls, who essentially put hers into remission by the way she ate.

I suspect these two methods will duke it out and the winner will be the one who works the best for the most people. And then what? Will MS be considered the same disabling illness when most people react to Dr. Wahl's protocol... like Dr. Wahls did?

And will we shame the ones it doesn't seem to work for?