How do you sack the professionals?

Abstract

It is now very difficult for an employer to sack anyone, except in a redundancy package, and even there the procedures are carefully regulated. This is in my view wholly right. In most cases where an employer dearly wishes that he could be rid of an employee's “services” it is a consequence of the inadequacy of his own hiring techniques, or because he has come to perceive the man working for him as a “trouble‐maker” (perhaps even, heaven forfend, a proselytiser for the Union) — which tells us more about the employer than it does about the employee. Few however have noticed that the task is doubly difficult if one is dealing with a member of a profession — that is to say someone who claims for himself an arcane and recondite body of high‐level knowledge, his possession and use of which can be properly judged only by his own professional peers.

Citation

Fowler, G. (1978), "How do you sack the professionals?", Education + Training, Vol. 20 No. 10, pp. 298-299. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb002017