For a one year period my current job location which is only 10 minutes away had a “staffing consolidation” so basically me and eight other people got reassigned to another branch that was an hour away for really no reason since the work we were doing over there was pretty much unnecessary since they were now overstaffed over there and the hours were horrendous (went from an 8am to 4pm job to a 4pm to 10pm job and working 6 days a week) After a year of these crappy hours they actually requested me back doing the same thing I had been doing previously with the exact same hours and days off I had previously, and it was only me that got the request. The other 7 people all eventually quit due to the bad hours except for one who got requested same as me a year after I came back.
From what I know now, I wouldn’t be surprised if they wanted to just fire people to save money but since it was a unionized job the only way to fire people was to force them to quit.
In our local Eugene newspaper, I recently read that the PenFed credit union, currently with offices here and in Virginia, was going to move a lot of back office employees to San Antonio, TX. Granted, San Antonio probably has a lot to recommend it, and it dos seem to be one of the more interesting cities in the state. But according to the article the company is only offering about $5K in relocation benefits, which is hardly adequate. We had to pay our movers about $8000 just to move here from SoCal, which isn’t as far away from here as San Antonio is.
If you’re going to relocate employees, you should have to pay ALL the moving expenses, IMHO.
I wasn’t exactly forced, but it was made clear that my expat package in Shanghai was sunsetting, and I should move back to the mothership while the getting was good. I did. It kinda worked out.
My brother used to work at MSFT, and had a manager that wanted to push him out to free up the headcount for someone else. He had been working out of his home office in Boulder for decades, and his manager figured no way he would relo to San Diego or Redmond. What his manager didn’t know was that he had become an empty nester, and his little brother lived in Redmond with space. So bro went into what was supposed to be his exit interview with his manager, and ripped the smile off of her face by saying “thank you so much, I’ve always wanted to work at MSFT HQ and this is such a great opportunity I can’t refuse.” That put a kink in his managers colon, but he kept the job for a few years longer and got to know his nieces really well.
At one company my job was going to be moved to Westminster in the OC from south Fairfax in L.A. near the 10. For people in my field it was a strong sellers’ market at the time so I had no trouble finding another position.
Yes - from 1984 until early 2002, I worked at a naval base in the San Francisco area, but it had long been planned for closure (and finally was shut down for good in 2005, although the city it is in is still arguing over just what to do with it), and my job moved to a new location that made it pretty much impossible for me to maintain my existing commute.