Or you could have tried google… There aren’t that many companies who are closing their Huntsville office and moving employees to Provo (or trying to).
Heh. After posting the OP, I searched Google for “huntsville provo st. louis”, and an article about Sirsi was the first hit. :smack:
I hear that there are some pretty good open source solutions in that area.
It’d be great for the local library to finally have a properly searchable catalog.
A CD is NOT a DVD is NOT an LP is NOT a BOOK!!!
It’s still hard for me to believe that they can eliminate vested vacation leave already earned. Going forward is a completely different story, of course.
In Bill Gole’s book, “Mergers and Acquisitions, Business Strategies for Accountants” he says that
FASB Statement 43 provides some food for thought.
Short of some weird acquisition clause in the employee handbook, something smells pretty fishy here.
My company just got acquired, and I got paid a hunk of money for my accrued vacation time. I would have rather kept it, but in our world of today that is pretty small potatoes.
Both the old company and the new company did cap accrual, which seems perfectly reasonable given that it is a liability. Retroactively capping it, something else.
Yes. The more I read the thread and think about it, the more I think my earlier glib response was full of crap.
But it doesn’t surprise me at all that they’d lie about being able to do so.
My former company was bought by a larger company, and our new overlords tried to confiscate our vacation time, in what I’m sure they felt was a clever way. They announced, around Thanksgiving, that there would be no vacation rollover-- anything not used by the end of the year would be forfeit. Considering December was our busiest time, there was no way for people to use their vacation-- and for some of us, like myself with 6 weeks, there was no mathematically possible way to use it, even if we’d walked out right then and not come back until Jan 1.
Some of us looked up the state laws and explained to them that in California, that was illegal. You could cap accrual, and you could pay out in lieu, but you couldn’t just erase it. They replied that, “unfortunately”, that was company policy and could not be changed. We went around several times, with them insisting policy could not be changed, and us replying "what do you not understand about the words “labor law?” Eventually, my boss threatened to get a lawyer involved, and suddenly they were able to make the change. But they made this huge deal out of their generosity, like they were doing some great and very special favor for the California office, when all they were doing was complying with existing law.
I say consult local labour specializing attorney.
Fuck the bastards. Split the cost between everyone hoping to get vacation pay, sounds like they are all tight with each other, shouldn’t be too hard.
They deserve to have to pay out hard. And, if there was a God in heaven, the law would include a penalty for trying to shine on employees and misrepresent the law to them.
Yeaaah, they know they’re in trouble.
Back in the plesticine epoch, I worked for a software company run by a former VP of a large consulting firm. At one point we had 35 consultants, watched over by a Manager, making 95% of the company’s income; and 6 developers, watched over by a Vice President and having an Administrative Assistant, spending most of the company’s money.
One year, we were promised profit sharing and were told the company was extremely profitable and we’d all get nice Christmas bonuses if we only worked hard(er). Well, December company meeting comes around and Bozo the Boss announces that there will be no profit sharing because he’d spent all the lovely profits on office furniture.
People started leaving.
So his next Big Thing was to announce that he was giving out stock in the company to keep his valued employees. A couple of months later, with much fanfare, we get our stock at another company meeting. Bozo is very public and very clear that his very few “big players” got 10,000 shares each, while the rest of us (80% of the company) got a mere 500 shares each. Nothing says “I value your contributions” like being told that you’re getting 1/20th of the amount that his handful of “big players” are getting, and stupidly telling the greater part of your company this in a public meeting where they can compare paperwork.
People fled in droves, and the company closed it’s doors about a year later.
About 10 years ago, I worked for a company that I will not name except to say that they are a big name in the credit score business. They decided to hire a new CEO and hired a major consulting firm to lead the search. No big shock when said companies taps one of it’s own VPs for the position. Bad news from day one when the stupid fucker shows up for a big presentation on his very first day…wearing a shirt with his old company’s name on it.
In very short order, said company went into Strip Down Mode. Monthly layoffs, forcing everyone to work 70+ hours a week with the stated expectation that this would prove your value and protect you from being laid off, followed by you being laid off the next month. Drove the stock price through the roof, and it split several times, as Wall Street fell in love with all the “cost cutting” (clearly unsustainable in the long run) and big and grandiose plans.
CEO broke his promise to move out to where the corporate HQ was located and moved the headquarters here. Company bought an interest in a corporate jet because it was too inconvenient for him to fly first class. When the drive to our local buildings proved too long, he rented luxury space downtown for his private offices. Industry respected people in high places were replaced with his cronies or simpy cut out completely. The sales department was completely gutted and replaced with his cronies and lackies from previous jobs and companies.
When they finally got rid of the fucker, the place had been gutted. A company whose entire worth was based on R&D and People skills had neither. The new CEO actually took the step of making a public apology to their customers for the company’s lack of people skills and gutting of it’s research and development.
Me, I was long gone. I left after I’d had a back injury and was told, after working 35 hours in one week because I had a Doctor’s appointment, a Chiropractor appointment and an MRI…that I would not be allowed to go to the Doctor anymore. Well, a few other things too.
Moral of the Story, like the OP, is that it only takes one IDIOT in charge in order to completely destroy a company by driving off or replacing it’s people.
“An integral part of SD’s new customer support model will be the customers themselves: The company also plans to leverage its users’ knowledge base into a new online Customer Support Center, to be launched in June (see image below). The groundwork for the new center is a “robust, indexed, searchable knowledge base,” which will “encourage library staff to discuss their challenges and successes with thousands of their peers around the world,” the firm said.”
So basically, the customers are going to help themselves. And it will use a database to do it. And this database will require significant knowledge of how the system works for it to make any sense. And requires programmers to write the damn thing.
Geez, sounds great, if only THEY STILL HAD THE EMPLOYEES to do that…
Anybody want to invest in my new lawn service company where the homeowner mows their own lawn? We make just our money charging a fortune for allowing them to use our very special lawnmowers. But we dont fix em or tell em how to use em…
Yeah, sounds like Sirsi is a real fucking winner:
None of this was ever proven in court. The Queens Borough Public Library settled on those super-secret ‘terms’ where you pretty much know what happened anyway. It’s good all of those employees got out now, as opposed to after the corporation really shoots itself in the foot. Besides, what kind of company equates ‘customer service’ to ‘no successful lawsuits against us’?
I have worked at not one, but two companies that were bought out by companies in the Provo area.
I was working at a small company north of Boston. We had a legacy product that still had some some support revenue coming in. There was one last release, Y2K compliant, but it was skipping toward obsolesence even then. So we were trying to get a new Linux product/service going. We got bought by a company in Orem. They gave us a while to get things off the ground, then closed our office and let everyone go. Shortly after, they changed their business model and became one of the most loathed companies in software.
So I got hired by another company that had some very well respected open-source projects. It got bought out by a company in Provo. They utterly trashed it; at least the project I was working on. They tried to integrate it with a similar program that they already had for Windows. The deal breaker was almost funny. They cut a deal with a hardware company to install our product on Linux boxes that they sold. We came up with a very tight schedule to get the release out in six months. Then during a conference call, someone from the hardware company said “now, when we release this in April…” Everybody looked around. Nobody knew where they got that date from. That gave us about three-and-a-half months. We worked our asses off. We couldn’t get any cooperation from the other company. We were on the hook for everything, and there didn’t seem to be any performance requirements for the other company. Then someone did some research and discovered that the box they wanted to bundle this with was something they sold eight of per year. Whoever negotiated our side of that deal was an idiot. Everybody on the project started sending out résumés. When enough people left, they cut loose the rest of us; said it was the only way they could get control of the project back. I’m not bitter about most companies I’ve worked for, but a bunch of people there got seriously screwed.
I did travel to Provo a couple times during all that. Kinda nice, but awfully quiet. There was a good Mexican restaurant that I’d go back to, though.
Looking at the responses it is very likely that an incident that happened to a close relative I have was different, but how different? :dubious:
Many years ago an electronics testing company did move from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles, again the company offered continued employment but only if you moved to LA also.
Most decided not to and quit just there. But my relative decided to get the help of other relatives in LA for temporary housing to continue working, commuting once a week back and forth from the bay area to LA. You see, his wife had a preexisting condition and there was no way that he would willfully lose unemployment benefits or the health ones with COBRA.
The buzz was that this was a jerk move by the company that knew all along that they were going to close shop anyhow, the move was precisely made to make most people quit and… Yep, no need to pay unemployment or health benefits as almost all employees lost them when they quit on their own. And so it was, the company folded a few months after the move and the very few that decided to follow it to the bitter end got unemployment and some severance pay.
I mention this not to be a party pooper here, but I wonder if the bastard company from the OP was also counting on many employees quitting.
nm
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the company probably didn’t want any of the employees to make the move. I’ve seen similar situations a number of times, and it’s usually set up in such a way so that the company is able to clean house without showing any layoffs on the books. They pay a bunch of severance pay, but get the employees off the books. The “moving package” they offer is typically a joke.
It must be a really funny joke, I mean fricken hilarious.
Well, for one thing, human beings are inherently greedy. The CEO’s on top do not care one whit about the workers. They do not have any compunction to take a perfectly good company/good situation and flush it down the toilet if it means just one more penny in their pocket than they made before.
The bad economy is no accident. The economy was set up to make workers into servants and keep them silent. Say one word different, and you are out on the street. “Corporate culture”? More like North Korea! The employees who do have a job will work nights, weekends, overtime, whatever, to stay away from home, stay away from their families and children, just to make some greaseball motherfucker in New York City just 1% more than last year.
Concerning “hellholes”, what’s wrong with Huntsville, Alabama?
My father worked for a chemical company for the first twenty years of his career. It was bought by a bigger company, then his portion was spun off and sold to someone else, and that company decided to move them from northern California to Mobile, Alabama. My father actually found in the fax machine a memo saying that they expected that most of the older employees would choose to take their severance instead, so the company would be able to unload the deadwood and just keep the young, cheap employees.
He consulted a lawyer, who pretty much told him that while he had some really good evidence, litigating was still going to be too expensive and risky to be worth it. So he took his meager severance package, as did all the other older employees. The bastards got just what they wanted.
Nothing. It’s a very nice place. Beautiful setting, and it’s a happening little town. I was narrating as if I were the corporate types.