Fairness: The hidden currency of the workplace

Some videos are almost certain to go viral: wild animals that pilfer food from unsuspecting families, cars that career through the windows of crowded cafes, pilots trying to land planes in high winds. Some are less obvious candidates to ricochet around the Internet. Take, for example, the case of Ms Brittany Pietsch, whose recording of a call in which she is laid off from a tech firm called Cloudflare went viral in January.

The recording lasts nine minutes, shows no one save Ms Pietsch and involves words like “performance-improvement plan”. Despite these unpromising ingredients, it makes public a moment of human drama that could occur to almost any employee. It also tugs at a fundamental human instinct. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Ms Pietsch’s dismissal, the manner in which she was fired, in a summary call with two people she had never met before and for reasons that are never properly explained, seems unfair. And few things matter more to people than fairness.