IT WAS ALL BS

Why don’t we send them pink slips?

There are pink slip support groups. At this moment, there are probably laid-off dotcommers writing angry novels about how the Pink Slip Generation was betrayed.

Description: But why pink?

The irony is that while the term has hit the big time, its origins are still a mystery. Peter Liebhold, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History who heads its work culture archive, has spent almost ten years trying to find the original pink slip – with no success. The term is not a new one. The first reference to it recorded by The Oxford English Dictionary goes as far back as 1915: “And have Murphy hand me the pink slip tonight,” urges one character in ‘Covering The Look In Corner’, a pulp novel with a baseball theme by Gilbert Patten, a prolific writer of the time.

That reference suggests it was established slang, and sometime back Liebhold thought he had nailed down its origin. He came across a story tracing the term to the Ford Motor Company, where shop floor supervisors had a crude system of recording employee performance. Those they thought were worth keeping got a slip of white paper in the pigeonhole for their work card; those who saw a pink slip instead knew they might as well leave. Unfortunately, Liebhold was not able to find any evidence to back this, so has concluded the story is apocryphal.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/definition/pink-slip