Riding Shotgun Down the Avalanche

[akirlu]

Well, that felt a lot like stepping off a cliff. Hal was laid off today. They gave him two weeks severance, but after his boss just having had him in for a discussion of moving him to days because of his seniority, it's pretty shocking. Apparently the word came down from corporate that the senior people were too expensive, and rather than move him over to a less-well-paid job, they just let him go.

We'll be all right for a while, muddling along on unemployment insurance and savings, and heaven knows all sorts of people are far worse off than we are, but today I feel like I swallowed a stone.

Welcome to the new economy. And thank heavens for a Democratic administration. Y'all keep your fingers crossed for us, will you?

Comments

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

Fy fan! I am sorry for you and Hal and hope there is a quick turn-around.

[seawasp]

I sense a great suckage in the Force.

Good luck to you and Hal... :(

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Oh, crap. What a lousy surprise. Best wishes for a new job soon.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

If the senior people are too expensive, why not ask them if they'll take a pay cut first? Some of them might rather have that than no job. Lose your experienced employees, the company goes down the tubes. That's what happened to Circuit City; they laid off all their salespeople who knew anything, and look at them now.

Sorry to hear this.

[ckd]

Well, that just sucks. (And doesn't bode well for the company, either; didn't they see what happened to Circuit City?)

Good luck to you both and may he find something where he will be both appreciated and compensated as he deserves.

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

Good luck to both of you!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Of course my fingers are crossed. What an unpleasant shock to have.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I agree, it's a foolish strategy for conserving the workforce assets of the company, but it wouldn't be the first time that an employer couldn't see past the balance sheet to the actual value of their employees. Even in the business school I used to work for, there was a pervasive attitude that employees are like interchangeable parts, and if one is inconvenient, a cheap replacement will do just as well. Never mind that close to 100% of the institutional memory of the place was in people's heads and nowhere else, including process documentation. Ah well. Their loss. Thanks for the kind thoughts.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Shit. This is getting really ugly, really fast.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Aaaaaugh.

[sraun]

Ouch! Good luck!

[sethb.livejournal.com]

"Senior employees are too expensive so we're letting them go"? That sounds like a violation of Age Discrimination laws.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

First, I'm paraphrasing our inference from what was said in the exit interview, so there's nothing actionable on paper that I'm aware of, and second, we're talking seniority in the job description, which isn't necessarily tied to age, since Hal hasn't been with the company for decades or anything.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, that thing. Even without going to Being Hit On the Head lessons.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It certainly felt awfully precipitous to me. But at this point I won't take it amiss if anyone decides to reduce or eliminate their degree of being beholden to Comcast. For myself, I have years of practice being without TV, and I can go back to that.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

What really sucks is that after a few years of contract work, we thought he *had* found a company where he was appreciated etc. as he deserves. On the other hand, the company is a wholly owned subsidiary of indifferent corporate masters, so it's hard to say how much say they had in how layoffs were handled.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

When I was laid off, the company went to a lot of effort to provide documentation for how many employees were in each age category and how many of each were laid off. Seniority in job description correlates positively with age, which might be strong enough to make using it illegal. If/when the government investigates, they'll look at the underlying numbers.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

I'm so sorry. It's a scary world these days. I hope he can find something else that's good.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

Very sorry to hear this. Best of luck to you both - hope he finds something bigger and better quickly.

[daystreet.livejournal.com]

Cheezus Effing Crap. That'll certainly take the bloom off the rose of America's New Beginning...

Well, good luck to both of you. Something will turn up, I'm sure. In spite of how things may seem at the moment, something always does seem to turn up, one way or the other, eventually, though it's often something entirely unexpected.

And hey, he may as well take a week or two off and enjoy himself and recharge his batteries. But then I'm a lazy son-of-a-bitch and my sage advice pretty much always involves: "Hey! Take the rest of the week off, why doncha?!"

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

Oh no! I'm so sorry! I hope he finds something quickly! Hugs.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'd have thought "being pushed" was a closer metaphor for this than "stepping off".

Sympathies, hope things work out.

And I continue to have heard very very little good about Comcast, ever.