My company is basically screaming from the rooftops that they don’t want to have much presence in the two high cost states that we have offices in and that they want as large of a presence in a ‘business friendly’ state. I don’t think they’re cutting the headcount but I’m sure they’d be ecstatic if some of us longer tenured and better paid employees resign.
I have decided to leave by the end of the year. I have no desire to live in the ‘business friendly’ state, nor do I want to drive again.
But this isn’t a resign or move situation, it’s more of a subtle way of getting people to leave. What’s been your experiences?
Businesses close offices and plants everyday. It’s part of doing business. Generally, depending upon the size and reputation of the company, companies will offer a number of things to employees:
Relocation benefits, bonuses, etc. for employees they wish to retain
Severance packages (even if not statutorily required) to employees they are severing. In the US there are no legal requirements other than employees that may have an employment contract. Generally severance will be 2 weeks pay for every year employed with a cap. The cap may be 2 months or six months. But will vary from company to company.
Early retirement incentives for employees closer to retirement age
Or could be nothing at all
State income taxes, tax holidays, economic grants, ease of permitting, etc. are tools that many governments use to create more “business friendly” environments to attract companies and the people they employ. Competition among states is a big deal, as seen by the recent Amazon HQ2 process.
Twice. I worked for awhile for a company that had relocated from New York to Denver. A great many of their employees, but not all of them, moved to Denver. After a couple of years they got a better deal in Salt Lake City and decided to move again. And again, most of the employees went along with it. But some of them didn’t, including me. In that case I was already working part time for another company, and I was able to go full-time with that company, so all good.
The last time, it was a company that started in Denver, then merged with a company in Rochester. Also had a Chicago office. They pretty much shut down Denver, and when it was down to just a couple of us, they decided it was all going to be Rochester. Well, I am not moving to Rochester. One of us had come out to Denver from Rochester and was not happy to be going back but that was home base. The other employee and I chose to find other alternatives in Denver. (I got unemployment for that one, it was considered a layoff, basically. But first I had to exhaust several months of severance pay. I’m sure a more motivated and less lazy person could have found something else during that severance period.) Within eight years, that company was defunct, so I would have moved to Rochester in vain.
I have a friend who worked for the FBI. One of his coworkers got transferred to somewhere (in fact I think it was KC) and the coworker’s wife wanted to stay in Denver, so she divorced him. My friend married her. When the FBI tried to transfer him, he thought about it for a minute, and decided he’d like to stay married to the woman who wanted to stay in Denver. He’s now a real estate broker. I have no idea if he got severance, though. Anyway he’s still married.
Back during the food service part of my career, the franchise owner at my McJob got the opportunity to purchase several stores in another part of the country. The one restaurant he had here no longer interested him and he sold it off. He told me that basically, because of the change in franchisee, I was out of a job. Most likely, the new owner would keep me on but there’s no guarantee that I would keep my accrued seniority, saved vacation time or well above minimum wage pay. If I wanted to follow him from Nebraska to North Carolina at my own expense, he would keep me on with my current compensation. Otherwise, I could stay here and take my chances.
I didn’t follow him to NC. The new owner reset my seniority but gave me a decent boost to my hourly rate. He then systematically destroyed morale, quality, worker safety, food safety, overall hygiene and customer loyalty. Six months later, I was fired by the manager when I made an improper comment about our latest health inspection. Two months after that, the owner contacted me, offered me my job back with a 20% raise and wanted me to take over their training program. He was buttering me up like a Sunday biscuit and I politely declined. Less than a year after that, the new owner was gone entirely.
I personally have not been forced to relocate. I’m in a line of work where it’s possible to work remotely and there no need for me to be in the same physical location as my coworkers (although there is an obvious benefit of easier collaboration if I am). I have at times worked on projects where half the team was in India and the other half in the US.
However, this does remind me of something that happened at a company I used to work for, which I thought about sharing in another thread. There was some directive from management to reduce the number of “cross site” teams. We had a team of circuit designers in one state and the rest of the team (with different specialties) in another state. Because of this directive, the circuit designers were all told to either relocate or find other jobs. All but one of them went with the option of finding other jobs (mostly within the same company, but with different teams). The one who did relocate was the superstar engineer who could debug pretty much any problem you gave him, so it was generally believed that the company must have made him a very generous offer to get him to stay. But the end result was still that we lost almost our entire circuit design team and had to scramble to hire new ones. The whole thing was considered a major screw up.
I worked in the software branch of a largish company near Chicago. That company bought another one in San Jose, CA, and I ended up working with the members of that branch so much I asked to be relocated there. To my surprise, I was given the okay and moved to sunny California.
Two years later, they gave the choice of moving back to IL or taking a “package”. I didn’t even hesitate to take the money, several months pay. Which left me in Silicon Valley in 1990 looking for a software engineering job, probably the best market for my skills in the country. Not long after, I had a much (much) better paying job at a local company, and I still work there nearly 30 years later.
I’d also lived in Chicago for 25 years previously and hated the place, so this wasn’t a difficult decision.
I hasn’t happened to me, but it has happened to friends. One was told she had a choice of moving to Toronto or SF (from NY). Her boss was flabbergast when she told him she wasn’t interested in moving and would find a new job.
When I got hired for my first job out of college, I was hoping to be sent to Denver. When it turned out the opening was actually in Pittsburgh, I thought about it and decided what the hell, I’d go live back east for a little while just to see what it was like. Then, after three years, the Pittsburgh office closed, and I was “forced” to transfer to Denver.
Had to move from one of our New Orleans suburb offices to basically downtown New Orleans. The change added about 40 minutes to my commute. Fortunately, it only lasted a year.
Kind of. I would have been subject to forced relocation, but not as a surprise - it was part of the “program”. Way back when I was in retail at a big box chain I reached the point where my next promotion would require a transfer. A transfer would follow every 2-3 years to wherever the company deemed necessary. Could be across town, could be across country. One could refuse a transfer only once without adversely affecting their career, but nobody did 'cause the reality was that it would affect your career. Relocation would only stop when and if one made it to the corporate office, which was in a place I didn’t want to live. I changed careers.
The Lovely and Talented Mrs. Shodan turned down a promotion that would have required a move to Dayton, Ohio. She didn’t want to move, I didn’t want to move, and the money wasn’t enough. It didn’t hurt her career (she was a project manager at the time), and she stuck around in her old position until we were able to let her retire undefeated to be a SAHM.
The ex-Mrs. ToKnow took a promotion in 1993 that required us to move from Columbia to Winston-Salem. It was only even something we considered because at that time there were only 3 accredited library schools in the Carolinas, and one was in Greensboro. The painful part was that about 2 weeks after she started at the Winston-Salem location, the manager at the Greensboro location quit and she was transferred there, which meant she had to commute for the year she continued with that employer, and I had to commute for my 2.5 years in grad school. Had the Greensboro manager quit a month sooner, we could have saved a lot on gas. (Although, being in Winston-Salem got me in with the bank, which got me my tuition reimbursement, which might have saved us more than the gas cost.)
I’ve been told to move or say goodbye 3 times in my career. Took the severance each time, mostly because my wife’s job offered more security than my chosen career path. Was a great decision in 2 of those choices, company mostly folded within 2 years.
Sounds like it’s more of move to cut overall costs than to get rid of employees.
My company moved its office in Connecticut to Boston. They offered everyone a transfer (but would only pay for the general manager to move.) The ones who didn’t want to move got a nice severance package.
Working in the Pharma industry, where everyone is constantly in the process of taking over everyone else, this was a more-or-less permanent threat. Now, we’re talking about the UK here, so none of these moves would have been of the 2000 mile variety, but hey - moving home is moving home.
Naming no names, I started with A, which was taken over by B (no move), which was bought by C (move to the far south east of the UK or leave - I left). Went to work for D, who then threatened to relocate to what they laughingly termed The M25 Corridor, so I left and went to work for E, who got taken over by F, which meant that for six months I had an 83 mile (each way) commute. F moved offices, which reduced the commute to 60-odd miles. I left anyway to go to the London office of G (a train commute!). Then (long story short) that office closed and relocated functions to the North of England. I moved to H, which was disastrous. Then I became a freelance consultant, working largely from home, and that was wonderful.
As a freelancer, I had very close ties with a consultancy group J, which was taken over by K, which was taken over by L, which was taken over by M. Through this last phase of my career, I worked out of my office at home but also had a “virtual” work address which moved all over the south of England. When I retired I had an office address with M in a building I had never even seen and which I could not have found on a map.
All in all, it was a lot of years spent dodging bullets.
as a kid my father’s job was transferred here to NC from NJ. At first he did not want to move the family from NJ but then he decided it was better to keep his job and move.
We all loved NC except for the lack of good Italian food
In 1996 my work location in San Jose was downsized and I didn’t have enough seniority to stay. I had to find another position in the company, but we had a pretty sweet union contract when it came to being surplussed. I found a job in San Diego and was given a week off with per diem for a scouting trip, free white-glove moving service and $6,000 cash for “miscellaneous expenses”. In my case, being forced to relocate worked out pretty nicely.
Once. They were moving my job from Santa Barbara to Irvine. Yeah right. I turned it down. It was cool though. They let me keep working until I found another job so long as it took less than a few months and it took me six weeks.
So many companies underestimate how much people love living in Santa Barbara. They will buy a little start up here and then tell them that they are moving it to somewhere else and everyone who moves will get generous relocation packages and literally everyone will say “fuck off. not leaving” and they will be forced to keep things here.
