Jetson! You're Fired!

Why your boss can tell you that and never explain why.

In June 1998 I got fired by U.S. News & World Report, where I was an assistant managing editor. It was no great mystery why. My boss, James Fallows, had gotten canned abruptly by the magazine’s owner, Mortimer Zuckerman, out of pique that Fallows was getting too much credit for the magazine’s achievements, and several of Jim’s admirers decided to protest this, on the record, to newspapers. I got fired first, because I managed to get quoted about U.S. News’s childish owner in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

“Mort has been sabotaging his own magazine,” I told Howie Kurtz at the Post, “and it’s been sickening to watch.” To the Times, I explained that the person who did the firing, Mort’s lieutenant, the late Harold Evans, a once-great newspaper editor who’d been put out to pasture and given a sinecure by Zuckerman, was ''a papier-mache boss'' who was ''frantically trying to look like he's not taking orders from Mort.'' I forget what I said to the Journal. My late first wife, Marjorie Williams, started introducing me to people as “my husband with Tourette’s.”

You get one shot in life to pull a stunt like this, and this was mine. Do it more than once and nobody will hire you ever again.

Getting fired, though, is not unusual at all. Most of my professional contemporaries have been shown the door at one time or another, often more than once. Usually no reason is given. No reason has to be given because in the United States we have something called “at will employment” where your boss can fire you for absolutely no reason, and frequently does. This blurs the distinction between layoffs and firings and makes it difficult to hang on to your job, even in industries that turn a profit, as journalism almost never does. That is the subject of my latest New Republic piece.

A striking memory from my firing at U.S. News is that my children, then aged 5 and not-quite 3, were at that time enamored of a Jetsons video in which George Jetson’s boss, Mr. Spacely, becomes enraged and fires him. “Jetson, you’re fired!” shouts Spacely. This was a recurring gag on the show, long before Donald Trump tried and failed (minus the “Jetson”) to trademark the phrase. My kids thought “Jetson, you’re fired!” was the funniest thing they’d ever heard, and even as I was contemplating how I would feed and clothe them they repeated that line over and over like a pint-sized Greek chorus.

Jecksom! Yo fiyoed!

Jecksom! Yo fiyoed!

Jecksom! Yo fiyoed!

My New Republic piece explains why people tend to get fired around Christmas and how the at-will doctrine means that nearly half of all Americans end up getting fired at one point or another. At-will employment doesn’t exist in most other countries, and it doesn’t exist in one of the 50 states because that state passed a law in 1987 forbidding it. You’ll never guess which one, and I’m not going to tell you because I want you to click through to the piece. You can read it here.