This thread reminded me of my current situation; but since there wasn’t really any drama (well, except the one girl who stormed out before she signed anything), I decided to start a new thread.
Maybe this should have gone into General Questions, since there is a question. Or possibly IMHO, since the answers might be opinion-based rather than fact-based. Or maybe even The Pit, because of the behaviour of the Vice President. But there’s a lot of MPSIMS in it, so I’m putting it here.
As you all know, I and seven others were laid off in October. This was the day after we had an All Hands meeting telling us how great our division was doing (11% revenue growth in the previous quarter) and that we shouldn’t worry about the layoffs that had happened in August.
As I’ve posted elsewhere, the VP made a mistake in laying people off in the first round. She got rid of an entire part of our department, and those people were the only ones who knew how to perform its function. The work needed to be done, but now there was no one to do it!
They also made a mistake when she laid off me and other people in our part of the department. We had no backlog of data. Now, I’ve heard, one person still there has 30 pages of backlogged data. I was the only person in the department who was seeking to increase the number of lines we load to our database, and to improve the quality of the data. (“More lines and higher quality” was a directive from on-high.) Now that I’m gone, there is no one there to write the programs to do this. (My contact there is using my routines with some success, but she is only able to “tweak” them. She can’t write new logic herself.)
Well, the other day I found out why we were all laid off. The VP felt that the department was “too much like a family”, and therefore had to be broken up. (I’ve heard about the VP’s family, BTW. She drops her 13-year-old daughter – whom “everybody hates” – with a neighbour of the sister of one of the people caught in the first round of layoffs. The VP’s son is a Goth, which must really gall her. The husband plays golf all day, and thus has no time for raising teenagers. No wonder she felt she had to “break up the family”.)
Modern corporations place a great deal of emphasis on “team building”. Looking for a job in a large company? “Must work well in a team environment.” And what is a team, but a kind of family? (Or what is a family if not a kind of team?) What this woman did was to break up a well-funtioning, very successful team that produced results, just because it was “too much like a family”, And the percentage of lines being loaded has gone down. and there is no one there who is focusing on data quality or who can do anything to fix it anyway. :rolleyes: What a great style of management! BTW, the pattern for the VP is to move into a department, gut it, stay for two years, and then leave before she has to take the blame for the fallout.
So anyway… I was talking to my former co-worker the other day (which is how I found out about the reasoning behind the layoffs). She had been called on the carpet last Friday (as was another co-worker, separately) because she had missed a meeting. The meeting had been called byone of the VP’s new-hires (she always brings in her own people) who failed to use the “reminder” function on Outlook. (Not using the reminder is “not done”.) So that part of the department missed the meeting. Another department that was there were surly. “Yeah, yeah. We’ve heard all this before. ‘New System.’ ‘Better.’ ‘Blah, blah, blah.’” And at the end (and this is verbatim), “Is this where we’re supposed to applaud?”
It seems the VP was in an especially ill-favoured mood, and she took it out on my former co-workers. “Do you need a reminder to go to lunch? Do you need a reminder to go home?” Never mind the enormous workload (for everyone) and the constant interruptions (to my co-worker, since she and I were the only ones who knew anything). My co-worker said she was sorry, but the VP was having none of it. She was going to rant and scream until she was done, and no apologies would be accepted. What a bitch.
There has been a rumour that the rest of the “old timers” would be laid off in April. But it occured to me that this is the end of the third quarter, and that getting rid of a couple of people might make the fourth quarter money look better. I think my former co-worker (and best friend in that office) and the other one (whom I don’t think likes me very much) are being set up. The thought ocurred to my former co-worker as well. She’s afraid she’ll be fired (as opposed to being laid off) and not get her severence package (24 week’s pay, in her case).
We had to sign agreements that we would not sue the company for wrongful termination before they would give us our severence package. It seems to me that if my former co-worker is fired, then she would have no incentive not to sue. (Oh, I should point out that we were laid off because our “positions have been eliminated” – and then they hired new people for the same positions.)
So the GQ or IMHO part of this rather lengthy post is: Would my former co-worker have a case if she were fired? It certainly seems the’s being set up. What could I say to help her win her case? Could I be a party to a class action lawsuit, even though I signed an agreement not to sue? (This, of course, is based upon whether they try to screw her out of her severence. She’s quite prepared to be laid off with the package in April.)
As for the Pitting of the Bitch, I’ll try to keep this out of The Pit. But… IMHO the VP is mentally ill. She clouded up and rained all over the former department director because he innocently called a woman “girl”. (He’s a Texan, and I understand that “girl” is acceptable there.) It sounds to me as if the VP has some inecurity issues. Why is she threatened by someone calling a woman “girl”? It could be that she’s just extremely PC; but I think that she sees anything that might even hint that she isn’t as good as or better than a male as a threat.
She’s also power-mad. She has been heard disparaging labourers because they’re not in such a lofty position as her own. (But I wonder who she calls when her plumbing leaks?) She’s very condescending and gives off the impression that if you are not part of Management, then you are nothing. If you are a manager but not a VP, then she’s better than you. She totally has that “I’m the boss of you!” vibe.
I’m not a psychologist, but I think she’s neurotic. (Yes, I know that the term is no longer in scientific use.) She takes innocent comments as threats to her authority, she gets rid of knowledgable people and replaces them with her own people which points to possible insecurity because she doesn’t “have control” over the old crew. She disparages people who do their jobs very well, just because they are not executives. She deals with her family by coming to work very early and leaving rather late, and letting the neighbours raise her kids while her husband plays golf. Definitely sounds like an inferiority complex, if you ask me.
Sorry for the extremely long post, but I had to get that off of my chest.