Work Layoffs
Posted by heymoe on December 5th, 2008
There nothing like going back to work after a long holiday weekend just to have the company down-size / let go / RIF / ax / etc.. 10 of your fellow colleagues.
I knew something was wrong when I got to the office and saw one of my co-workers outside crying on the steps. Once inside the office I was told there was a all-hands meeting and needed to go to a conference room. Others in the conference room were chatting away like we normally do while waiting for a meeting to start and no one seemed to know what the meeting was about. I went back to my desk to setup my laptop as the co-worker who I saw crying outside walked by and made a comment to me that I thought was a little weird at the time related to a request they made yesterday. Walking to the break room to get a drink I noticed that a lot of managers had their doors shut talking with co-workers one-on-one. Leaving the break room I was blocked from taking the long way back to the conference room by another manager and was told to go directly back to the conference room.
Back in he conference room I started to put two and two together and realized that the company was laying people off. It wasn’t until several minutes later that the President of the company walked into the conference room to announce to everyone officially that the company was laying off 8 employees and 2 contractors.
This caught a lot of people by surprise especially since the company down played the effects of the current economic crisis on the company and made it sounds like there was no need to worry about anyone losing their job in a previous meeting we had a few weeks back.
A co-worker asked why the company spent a lot of time recently to hire on a lot of management and higher positions (Chiefs) just to let go 10 non-management positions (Indians) which left some of these Chiefs without people to manage. As to be expected we all got a nice horse and pony show / magic hands / tap-dance type answer to justify letting go the 10 people who do a lot of day to day work so that the managers will be around if the company should need to use them for possible future management needs like maybe buying companies that are falling on hard times due to the economic crisis.
In the end two co-workers in my group got let go and the whole ordeal pretty much left the whole company in a state of very low morale.
