The Working Waste Case

Let me be frank: I’ve been laid off twice and it’s pissing me off. Not that being laid off shouldn’t be a reason for getting pissed off, but the causes behind it warrant further discussion.

In the first case, the layoff occurred five months after I was hired. Executive management came to the conclusion that my site was not cost-effective and determined that off-shoring operations to China would fix the problems.

It did not. Three years later, the site in China also closed down. Project deliverables were not being met; business strategy dive-bombed. So now, workers in two countries were displaced, and the corporate leaders re-trenched in their Connecticut headquarters and broke out the cheaper Scotch and drank to failed endeavors gone wrong – but better times to come. (Yippee-ki-yayyyy!)

And the stock continues to tank.

I ask myself why the company hired me in the first place, if it knew that it was going to shutter U.S. operations? But I think it’s because, in all honesty, the better Scotch went to the heads of those responsible for keeping the business viable. The headiness of their position, their insulation from the reality of what was really going on at the operational level, kept them from making sound decisions. It kept them nestled in their security blankets, thumbs stuck in their mouths, comforted in the belief that ‘Mommy Free Market’ would prevail and they would remain safe and sound, profitable and cushy behind their cherry wood desks.

I sometimes like to entertain the delusion that I was hired to turn things around. But if that was true, why was I under the impression, as a former business customer, that the company didn’t need turning around? In retrospect, I realize that I simply backfilled a position for someone else, who was asked to go to another position, in order to try to turn around the problems in the new technology group. I was just an interim pawn in the chess game of Factory Operations Gone Bad. The cherry wood executives needed someone quickly to plug up the hole; I was their man.

I did not take it bitterly, at the time. In fact, morale had soured so badly and the stress levels had amped up so much at this particular place that everyone, including me, seemed to let out a sigh of relief when the mass layoff was announced. For some strange reason, Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’  kept racing through my head.    

 

 

 

 

 

    I didn’t get the same feeling after the second layoff.  In fact, I had a sense of gloom, beforehand.  The build-up was silently understood, darkly expected, relentlessly anticipated.    It hung heavily throughout the plant;  it stunk like a rotting carcass among the workers across the site, as the inevitable approached.   It was the oppressive realization that this was the beginning of the end, for a lot of people.  (For exactly  33.37% of the workforce, as a matter of fact)   Who was going to get it? 

If you were a solid performer, meaning you demonstrated dependability, aptitude, a good working rapport with your peers, you were at risk.  If you had good skills but not quite enough expertise in specific areas, you were at risk.  If  you had put in several years of 60+ hour workweeks, including weekends and holidays, but you did not have seniority, you were at risk.

Generally, if you deserved to work but the employability algorithm cranked out a certain ranking, you were on the hit list.  

If you were a good worker, but not good enough, you were probably gone.

Some people are quite blasé about attributing the market as the cause of mass displacement, and that laid off workers should get over it.  I do not.  Market volatility and employment security may go hand in hand, but they are not merely incidental.  They are the products of errors in judgment, incompetency in leadership and lassitude in regulatory oversight. 

Or, as a project manager acquaintance of mine put it:  layoffs are essentially projects gone bad. 

The job hunt clubs and displacement services and career coaches and government boards tasked to address unemployment are members of the new project team that expects to resolve this problem.  But they are not the stakeholders.  The laid off –  the ones facing lack of healthcare for their families, inability to pay the mortgage and utilities, difficulty buying food and clothes, and the prospect of losing much or all of their long-term savings –   these are the ones relying upon the expertise, the care and consideration, and vested interest of those trying to get them back to work.

I for one hope that the new project, to get people back to work, succeeds.  I hope that the new project managers work the field and monitor the progress of the reemployment efforts – that they don’t hide behind cherry wood desks and sip good Scotch. 

And I do hope no one will blame me for being laid off and proudly pissed.

Jake desJardins

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 5:00 pm and is filed under The Nature of Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.