Up in the Air Movie Review

Rivera, Victoria Marie L.

A REACTION PAPER: UP IN THE AIR MOVIE

“Don't get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” ― Dolly Parton

The film is a realistic, bitter-sweet and satirical in nature kind-of-flick. I never thought that making life instantaneously miserable through firing employees can be actually a living. While it is relatively crucial and essential to hire employees for the organization, same goes as to fire some of them; and the movie sophisticatedly captures the very substance of it.

Being an experienced corporate downsizer, Ryan Bingham (Clooney) has suitably mastered his profession; doing research first on employees’ background and conducting motivational speech for them. Firing people and managing layoffs are very personal and derogatory matters; and Bingham always tried to communicate the layoff message unscripted, personally and leniently.

In corporate retrenchment undertakings, employee relations should be always upheld by Human resources (HR) department for both downsized employees, and most importantly those survivors; for such undertakings might brought about economical and efficiency impacts on the outputs of the latter. HR must be willing to control and manage behavioral repercussions of the termination process– preservation of dignity, minimization of likelihood of retaliation (Skarlicki, et al., 2008), protection of the organization’s reputational capital (Wood & Karau, 2008). It is apparent in the movie that the in-house HR passed on ending emotional attachments to the third party; which making the former impersonal and unsympathetic. HR should be the focal contact when it comes to facilitation and resolution of workplace issues.

Needless to say, because of increasing organizational demands on sustainability and excellence, HR is a management