I completely forgot to mention the 2014 “Happy Thanksgiving” email my CEO mailed to all of the employees which assured us that being laid off isn’t that bad. The ceo explained that a previously laid off employee stopped him on the street in LA and said being laid off was the best thing to happen to him since he took that opportunity to become a recording artist.
Happy Thanksgiving indeed.
Only time I was laid off, it was a happy thing for me too. But because of how terrible the company I was working for was. The job was so bad, I nearly quit the field of my dreams when I was laid off. Your CEO showed a terrible lack of a clue.
And if that cluelessness works out for him the way it did for the guy I was working with … 
I’m sure it doesn’t help hearing this at this exact moment. But what comes around sometimes does go around. Wishing you all the best in your job hunt.
Evidently things aren’t going well at McClatchy (i.e., not well enough for the CEO and/or owners). They closed down their foreign bureau last year.
Yeah, I’m critical of his email, but I also can acknowledge that it was a blessing for me too. I never fit in the corporate world that seems to march forward with as much focus and understanding as baby huey, but with the blinded devotion of a north korean dictatorship. While I’m still searching to replace my salary and benefits, I am also actively pursuing my dreams for the first time in my adult life. So he was correct in my circumstance even thought it pissed me off, but most of the people I worked with have children and were fulfilled just to be able to support their family.
I simply do not understand asking the laid-off to train their replacements. Does management not even suspect the newbies will be taught helpful tips on enhancing cooling fans with ice cream and using alt-F4 in lieu of Enter?
Whether or not any great amount of thought is put into it, the payoff of having qualified people train their replacements is probably good enough to absorb the likelihood of a few saboteurs. People tend to imagine in six moths or a year, the folks who made a bad decision will realize their mistake and try to hire them back.
Which makes it harder to envision … feeding cupcakes into the copy machine.
Corporate lickspittles. Where is Ned Ludd when we need him?
Oh I’ve no doubt some folks are still having their fun. They’re just likely doing it in ways that are harder to trace or verify ( Reuters logo claimed to be a swirling toilet - whoever they paid to hide this one did quite well; had a hard time tracking it down; I’m not claiming this story about the logo is definitely true ).
Yeah, it’s totally shitty, thus my sarcasm (I should have tagged that). My friend’s unusually fortunate situation aside, employers pull this shit because they’re confident that their workers will take longer than the period of continued employment + severance to find new work, assuming similar jobs even remain in the local economy. So they have us over a barrel and can have us train a replacement and there’s nothing we can do that doesn’t involve cutting off our nose to spite our face (especially considering the loss of unemployment benefits). I found it pretty galling that my friend’s former boss was actually upset she turned down their off to train her replacement at what turned out to be below-market wages and in the middle of a family emergency; he was essentially asking her for a favor after having fired her. Fuck that dude.
A company where I worked a few years back - and got laid off along with everyone but a couple employees - kept the IT staff while they figured out where they were going to outsource that work (after having already outsourced everything else). My friend in IT was desperate to quit (because on top of being a shitty place to work, the idiot manager was going to make everyone relocate from SF to LA because he wanted to live there, even though it was obvious the company wasn’t going to be around much longer), but he couldn’t simply couldn’t afford to do so - the unemployment benefits alone kept him there. I actually felt lucky to have been laid off, even though we only got a couple weeks severance (and was apparently fortunate to get that, as I later heard that their first instinct was to give us nothing).
I worked for a company whose biggest vendor was [insert name of giant US corporation with worldwide operations]. My main contact there had the same story - he and his cohorts had to train their India-based replacements. A few months later, when India went live, it was a fiasco. The phone lines were crap, communication was lacking, service went down the toilet. And when you’re talking about customers with millions and millions of dollars in yearly payments, how good of an idea is this?
My contact was hired back at his job a couple of months later.
Do corporations realize that in their utopia they will be serving a market consisting exclusivity of poorly paid workers in Bangladesh, India, China, and Indonesia?
Oh, and their obscenely wealthy CEOs.
If it came down to that, I’d be inclined to say “I’m out – either you need me, or you don’t need me.”
EDIT: Like what @Shuck described: “You’re firing me and you want me to do you a favor?”
Patrick Talamantes has a Twitter account @ptalamantes. If you think his decision to outsource jobs is a bad idea, please send him a tweet.
Oh, I’d stick around for every payday I could…But don’t expect that “training” to be good enough to keep the machines running or to keep the company in compliance with laws…
I’d think that a newspaper outsourcing IT is just asking to be hacked by the ideologically minded,
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
