At the tail end of a massive maintenance shutdown (16 hr days for everyone, for 2 weeks) the mill leadership started a site-wide meeting with pictures and stories of their recent trip to Japan. How they went golfing, the great meals they had, their trip to the mountain, etc. They finally wrapped that up and proceeded to tell us that cost of living raises were going to be small that year due to them being “unsure about next year’s profit margins”.
There was a pretty steady wave of resignation letters for the 6 months following that meeting.
It’s amazing how often I see executives talking about their cool trip, their new plane, or other rich person bullshit during the same presentation where they are telling their employees to suck up some furlough, reneg on bonus, or similar financial hardship.
Similar thing happened at my first job out of college. It was a year into COVID and we’d been WFH since the spring before this annual June meeting. They had just gotten done announcing that our productivity had exceeded targets, when they added two more announcements:
WFH was ending, and we’d all have to go back to an office that didn’t have enough desks for everyone to be there all at once but that was okay because we could all just coordinate amongst ourselves as to who gets to sit where and when and when we had in person all-hands meetings some people could just sit on the floor and work.
Due to a lawsuit filed against an entirely different OU we shouldn’t expect much in the way of bonuses this year.
We saw the stress the company was under between the lawsuit and the move, so over the next couple months we helped by cutting about a million dollars a year from their annual salary budget.
Where I was. I noped tf out of there, and a few weeks after they started enforcing RTO America set it’s records for daily new COVID cases and daily deaths. We really did do COVID the way we did Vietnam: it got too expensive so we gave up, declared victory and threw a bunch of people away.
It’s almost always better for a company to have resignations than layoffs.
So it’s kind of always been a thing for them to “encourage” resignations with shit like this, then hire back new people later for drastically lower salaries.
It’s what a lot of places are doing now mandating return to the office.
Companies are putting up postings for positions they don’t have any intention of filling any time soon.
This way when they are ready to hire, they finally look at resumes and can start scheduling interviews ASAP. It’s shifting all the wait time of the process to applicants.
Combine the two, and you end up with companies being able to maintain bare minimum staffing regardless of workload without having to ever pay severance packages.
It’s actually really smart, as long as you don’t have the tiniest shred of empathy and think of workers as machines and not people.
Really explaibs how I got an answer to my application 14 month later. But they were consulting work companies. So you were hired when they needed a consultant with your profile.
I interviewed with one company I wanted to work at, but no answer after 2 months, so I interviewed elsewhere. That place had me start within a month. 6 months into working at my job, the first company said “ok, we are ready to schedule your start date”. I took that as a sign that it probably wouldn’t have been a great place to work.
It only works when the government backs citizens over companies. Because a public company is required to put profits over everything else.
So there needs to be regulations getting passed to keep blocking whatever new bullshit someone set up.
All it would take would be requiring companies to have a start/end date on applications and only be able to hire from applications received in that window.
It’s already how the federal government does hirings. The government gets a lot of shit, but they’ve got one of the best unions around.
That sounds good in theory but with layoffs you tend to at least aim to let the worst employees go. With resignations you have literally the opposite. The best people are the ones that will go and the best ones will go first as they can and will find a new job more easily.
Not saying that they don’t do it for that reason but sometimes (and I’d say most times) people are just incompetent and do stupid shit like this.
At the tail end of a massive maintenance shutdown (16 hr days for everyone, for 2 weeks) the mill leadership started a site-wide meeting with pictures and stories of their recent trip to Japan. How they went golfing, the great meals they had, their trip to the mountain, etc. They finally wrapped that up and proceeded to tell us that cost of living raises were going to be small that year due to them being “unsure about next year’s profit margins”.
There was a pretty steady wave of resignation letters for the 6 months following that meeting.
It’s amazing how often I see executives talking about their cool trip, their new plane, or other rich person bullshit during the same presentation where they are telling their employees to suck up some furlough, reneg on bonus, or similar financial hardship.
tons of upvotes and comments for this one. definitely a frequent flop by management.
Similar thing happened at my first job out of college. It was a year into COVID and we’d been WFH since the spring before this annual June meeting. They had just gotten done announcing that our productivity had exceeded targets, when they added two more announcements:
WFH was ending, and we’d all have to go back to an office that didn’t have enough desks for everyone to be there all at once but that was okay because we could all just coordinate amongst ourselves as to who gets to sit where and when and when we had in person all-hands meetings some people could just sit on the floor and work.
Due to a lawsuit filed against an entirely different OU we shouldn’t expect much in the way of bonuses this year.
We saw the stress the company was under between the lawsuit and the move, so over the next couple months we helped by cutting about a million dollars a year from their annual salary budget.
i hope you have a workplace safety agency where you are, because damn…
Where I was. I noped tf out of there, and a few weeks after they started enforcing RTO America set it’s records for daily new COVID cases and daily deaths. We really did do COVID the way we did Vietnam: it got too expensive so we gave up, declared victory and threw a bunch of people away.
Jesus, some people just have no awareness whatsoever.
It’s almost always better for a company to have resignations than layoffs.
So it’s kind of always been a thing for them to “encourage” resignations with shit like this, then hire back new people later for drastically lower salaries.
It’s what a lot of places are doing now mandating return to the office.
Quiet firings.
Quiet hirings are a thing now too…
Companies are putting up postings for positions they don’t have any intention of filling any time soon.
This way when they are ready to hire, they finally look at resumes and can start scheduling interviews ASAP. It’s shifting all the wait time of the process to applicants.
Combine the two, and you end up with companies being able to maintain bare minimum staffing regardless of workload without having to ever pay severance packages.
It’s actually really smart, as long as you don’t have the tiniest shred of empathy and think of workers as machines and not people.
Really explaibs how I got an answer to my application 14 month later. But they were consulting work companies. So you were hired when they needed a consultant with your profile.
I interviewed with one company I wanted to work at, but no answer after 2 months, so I interviewed elsewhere. That place had me start within a month. 6 months into working at my job, the first company said “ok, we are ready to schedule your start date”. I took that as a sign that it probably wouldn’t have been a great place to work.
That’s messed up.
That’s capitalism.
It only works when the government backs citizens over companies. Because a public company is required to put profits over everything else.
So there needs to be regulations getting passed to keep blocking whatever new bullshit someone set up.
All it would take would be requiring companies to have a start/end date on applications and only be able to hire from applications received in that window.
It’s already how the federal government does hirings. The government gets a lot of shit, but they’ve got one of the best unions around.
That sounds good in theory but with layoffs you tend to at least aim to let the worst employees go. With resignations you have literally the opposite. The best people are the ones that will go and the best ones will go first as they can and will find a new job more easily.
Not saying that they don’t do it for that reason but sometimes (and I’d say most times) people are just incompetent and do stupid shit like this.