The 7 Year Itch
Okay, time for a little explanation of why I’m so damn bitter between 8:00 and 5:00 Monday-Friday. (And I apologize up front for my incessant whining.)
It just dawned on me that yesterday was my 7th anniversary with my primary employer. Wow, 7 years. That’s the longest amount of time I’ve ever had a job. (The shortest? That’d be my one day with a retailer many years ago, when I was young and courageous (and a little stupid). I looked at the plastic nametag and mop they handed me, said, “screw this”, and walked out. Never went back.)
In many ways, it’s surprising I’ve lasted here that long. Most of the staff has been laid off over the past 4 years or so, and there are relatively very few people around here any longer with over 5 years tenure. Who knew I’d end up as an “old timer?”
Time for a history lesson: Things were chugging along beautifully back in the “good old days” – 1998, 1999, even early 2000. At the end of Y2K, my employer had a U.S. staff of 25,000 or so, plus another 13,000 international workers all over the planet. My facility had 9,000 employees, and was by far one of the largest employers within a 100 mile radius. We received small-but-fair bonus checks every month, and with a little hard work and dedication you could work yourself up to a fairly livable salary (I doubled my pay in less than two years through hard work and "far exceeds expectations" reviews). Our Christmas party that year had REO Speedwagon as the musical guest. Life was good.
Then things quickly fell apart. In Jan 2001 the company announced less than expected 4th quarter earnings, and that there would be an immediate 12% reduction in staff to “rightsize” the company. Rightsizing. That’s what the execs called it. Bastards.
Over the next 3 years the company tried dozens of new strategies to bring back profitability, but it didn’t happen. Quarter after quarter of losses piled up. Executives came and went on an almost daily basis. Advertising plans totally flipped from consumer to professional to enthusiast to professional again, then back to consumer. Nothing seemed to work. The company started closing facilities around the country, and before long announced that they were pulling out of the international market altogether. 13,000 people lost their jobs that day.
The company then decided that outsourcing was the way to go. Just about every job category (except for the executive level, of course) was about to be shipped out of the country. Human Resources, IT, Manufacturing, Customer Service, Support, Accounting, you name it – were all now handled by a company in Bombay, India, which paid their employees an average of $2.65 an hour. My local facility, which once housed 9,000 employees, was down to about 900 people. It became a literal ghost town. Row after row of now-empty cubicles were lined up, like one of those zombie movies where everyone has just suddenly disappeared. It was nothing to see major headlines that another 2,500 or 5,000 employees had been laid off. The local economy tanked as the unemployment rate skyrocketed.
My team somehow managed to miss the Jan 2001 layoffs, but they weren’t the last of the job cuts – far from it. We had 16 writers on September 24, 2001 – but only 10 on Sept 25. My former group, which when I left had 150 employees, was reduced to 45. A few months later our 10 writers was “rightsized” down to 9. A few months after that, our party of 9 was cut into a party of 4. The work load remained, but with 75% less employees. And just when it couldn’t get any more gruesome, we lost yet another writer last October. So now where there was 16, there is now 3.
Last November they packed the last few of us that remain here into one building – we used to have 5 – and tried to pretend that everything was fine, and that once again we’d be a happy family. Yeah, right. We’d just lived through 10 major rounds of job cuts, and watched our friends and family members be escorted out the door time and time again. From 38,000 employees to just 1,800. Ouch.
I have a hard time describing what it feels like to come to a job in the morning knowing that odds are even that this will be your last day working there. Try doing that for four straight years. Even now, when they haven’t cut any more positions since last fall, you still find yourself looking over your shoulder. We’ve been burned too many times to trust management. You couldn't plan a vacation, and you were afraid to take a sick day, less HR decide that if they could do without you for one day, perhaps they could do without you forever. Rumors flew all the time, and the company did little or nothing to reassure us. Oh, yeah -- there was a town hall meeting with our former CEO, where he told us that "those awful layoffs are a thing of the past." People cheered. This was on a Friday; the following Wednesday...guess what? The Chief Executive of our company - the man we counted on for our livelihoods - had lied to our faces. No wonder there is so little trust around here anymore.
Meanwhile, for those of us that have remained (notice how I didn’t say “are lucky enough”), life hasn’t been all that easy. There has been a wage freeze in place for the last two years, and our last pay increase was a token piddly amount in 2003 that figured out for me to be $17 a paycheck. There’s little incentive to work harder, as it won’t matter financially. I can bust my ass and double my productivity, and be paid exactly the same. Or I can coast along, do my job but nothing more, and be paid exactly the same. We haven’t had a review in two years (there’s really no point, since they can’t set goals or offer a wage increase for making or exceeding targets), and if Skippy Whitebread was to even say, “Hey, Tommy – I sure appreciate what you do” or “You know what, Tom? Thanks for a good job,” I’d probably check to see if hell has frozen over, right after I faint.
There’s not a chance of promotion or a raise, and their bonus program is structured in such a way that it’s damn near impossible to hit it. Oh, yeah – they do offer us stock options, but the price is always above the market value, so we’ve never been able to cash them in. (Cut them in quarters and use them as toilet paper or kindling for the BBQ. Maybe then they’ll be useful.) Meanwhile, our insurance costs have gone up 40%, they’ve cut our sick leave days, they’ve monkeyed with the vacation policy so that you can’t take it with you if you’re the next to be rightsized, and they’ve cheapened up on everything there is. Remember the REO Speedwagon Christmas? The next year there was a potluck. The year after that, and every Christmas since? We were treated with a week of unpaid leave. Ho, ho, ho.
So here I sit, waiting for the next shoe to fall. We still have the same work load we’ve always had, but with far less people to respond to it. My team of 24 (including managers) is now a team of 6. My old group of 150 is now a team of 3. (They were outsourced to the Philippines.) Manufacturing is 100% gone, and products are now built in Mexico and Asia. Part of the old manufacturing facility has since been leased out be a company that makes fertilizer carts. The other four buildings in our complex have been mothballed and are currently for sale, as they have been for the past year. Remaining employees drop out daily – the first chance they have at a new job, they tend to jump for it. Even executives are bailing around here; they must be tired of not being compensated for their work, too. The company is now desperate to fill some positions – funny, they’re having a hard time recruiting qualified people, since their reputation as a company that doesn’t pay well and likes to lay off their staff has proceeded them. Gee, imagine that.
And you wonder why I (and probably just about everyone else around here) is hard at work on an exit strategy?
Ah, my exit strategy. The light at the proverbial end of the tunnel. It’ll take me two years to finish it, but when it’s done, my E.S. will be a work of art. It’ll be a beautiful thing. And when I go, it’ll be on my own terms – not from a tap on my shoulder from HR saying, “Mr. Gressel, will you come with me?”
More details on my E.S. will be forthcoming. I’m kinda excited about it, though. I’ll be able to bag his hellhole, and go give my time and energy to a company that will respect me as a person and value me as an employee. And that, my friends, is what I’ll have.
Until then...thank you for listening.
TJ
It just dawned on me that yesterday was my 7th anniversary with my primary employer. Wow, 7 years. That’s the longest amount of time I’ve ever had a job. (The shortest? That’d be my one day with a retailer many years ago, when I was young and courageous (and a little stupid). I looked at the plastic nametag and mop they handed me, said, “screw this”, and walked out. Never went back.)
In many ways, it’s surprising I’ve lasted here that long. Most of the staff has been laid off over the past 4 years or so, and there are relatively very few people around here any longer with over 5 years tenure. Who knew I’d end up as an “old timer?”
Time for a history lesson: Things were chugging along beautifully back in the “good old days” – 1998, 1999, even early 2000. At the end of Y2K, my employer had a U.S. staff of 25,000 or so, plus another 13,000 international workers all over the planet. My facility had 9,000 employees, and was by far one of the largest employers within a 100 mile radius. We received small-but-fair bonus checks every month, and with a little hard work and dedication you could work yourself up to a fairly livable salary (I doubled my pay in less than two years through hard work and "far exceeds expectations" reviews). Our Christmas party that year had REO Speedwagon as the musical guest. Life was good.
Then things quickly fell apart. In Jan 2001 the company announced less than expected 4th quarter earnings, and that there would be an immediate 12% reduction in staff to “rightsize” the company. Rightsizing. That’s what the execs called it. Bastards.
Over the next 3 years the company tried dozens of new strategies to bring back profitability, but it didn’t happen. Quarter after quarter of losses piled up. Executives came and went on an almost daily basis. Advertising plans totally flipped from consumer to professional to enthusiast to professional again, then back to consumer. Nothing seemed to work. The company started closing facilities around the country, and before long announced that they were pulling out of the international market altogether. 13,000 people lost their jobs that day.
The company then decided that outsourcing was the way to go. Just about every job category (except for the executive level, of course) was about to be shipped out of the country. Human Resources, IT, Manufacturing, Customer Service, Support, Accounting, you name it – were all now handled by a company in Bombay, India, which paid their employees an average of $2.65 an hour. My local facility, which once housed 9,000 employees, was down to about 900 people. It became a literal ghost town. Row after row of now-empty cubicles were lined up, like one of those zombie movies where everyone has just suddenly disappeared. It was nothing to see major headlines that another 2,500 or 5,000 employees had been laid off. The local economy tanked as the unemployment rate skyrocketed.
My team somehow managed to miss the Jan 2001 layoffs, but they weren’t the last of the job cuts – far from it. We had 16 writers on September 24, 2001 – but only 10 on Sept 25. My former group, which when I left had 150 employees, was reduced to 45. A few months later our 10 writers was “rightsized” down to 9. A few months after that, our party of 9 was cut into a party of 4. The work load remained, but with 75% less employees. And just when it couldn’t get any more gruesome, we lost yet another writer last October. So now where there was 16, there is now 3.
Last November they packed the last few of us that remain here into one building – we used to have 5 – and tried to pretend that everything was fine, and that once again we’d be a happy family. Yeah, right. We’d just lived through 10 major rounds of job cuts, and watched our friends and family members be escorted out the door time and time again. From 38,000 employees to just 1,800. Ouch.
I have a hard time describing what it feels like to come to a job in the morning knowing that odds are even that this will be your last day working there. Try doing that for four straight years. Even now, when they haven’t cut any more positions since last fall, you still find yourself looking over your shoulder. We’ve been burned too many times to trust management. You couldn't plan a vacation, and you were afraid to take a sick day, less HR decide that if they could do without you for one day, perhaps they could do without you forever. Rumors flew all the time, and the company did little or nothing to reassure us. Oh, yeah -- there was a town hall meeting with our former CEO, where he told us that "those awful layoffs are a thing of the past." People cheered. This was on a Friday; the following Wednesday...guess what? The Chief Executive of our company - the man we counted on for our livelihoods - had lied to our faces. No wonder there is so little trust around here anymore.
Meanwhile, for those of us that have remained (notice how I didn’t say “are lucky enough”), life hasn’t been all that easy. There has been a wage freeze in place for the last two years, and our last pay increase was a token piddly amount in 2003 that figured out for me to be $17 a paycheck. There’s little incentive to work harder, as it won’t matter financially. I can bust my ass and double my productivity, and be paid exactly the same. Or I can coast along, do my job but nothing more, and be paid exactly the same. We haven’t had a review in two years (there’s really no point, since they can’t set goals or offer a wage increase for making or exceeding targets), and if Skippy Whitebread was to even say, “Hey, Tommy – I sure appreciate what you do” or “You know what, Tom? Thanks for a good job,” I’d probably check to see if hell has frozen over, right after I faint.
There’s not a chance of promotion or a raise, and their bonus program is structured in such a way that it’s damn near impossible to hit it. Oh, yeah – they do offer us stock options, but the price is always above the market value, so we’ve never been able to cash them in. (Cut them in quarters and use them as toilet paper or kindling for the BBQ. Maybe then they’ll be useful.) Meanwhile, our insurance costs have gone up 40%, they’ve cut our sick leave days, they’ve monkeyed with the vacation policy so that you can’t take it with you if you’re the next to be rightsized, and they’ve cheapened up on everything there is. Remember the REO Speedwagon Christmas? The next year there was a potluck. The year after that, and every Christmas since? We were treated with a week of unpaid leave. Ho, ho, ho.
So here I sit, waiting for the next shoe to fall. We still have the same work load we’ve always had, but with far less people to respond to it. My team of 24 (including managers) is now a team of 6. My old group of 150 is now a team of 3. (They were outsourced to the Philippines.) Manufacturing is 100% gone, and products are now built in Mexico and Asia. Part of the old manufacturing facility has since been leased out be a company that makes fertilizer carts. The other four buildings in our complex have been mothballed and are currently for sale, as they have been for the past year. Remaining employees drop out daily – the first chance they have at a new job, they tend to jump for it. Even executives are bailing around here; they must be tired of not being compensated for their work, too. The company is now desperate to fill some positions – funny, they’re having a hard time recruiting qualified people, since their reputation as a company that doesn’t pay well and likes to lay off their staff has proceeded them. Gee, imagine that.
And you wonder why I (and probably just about everyone else around here) is hard at work on an exit strategy?
Ah, my exit strategy. The light at the proverbial end of the tunnel. It’ll take me two years to finish it, but when it’s done, my E.S. will be a work of art. It’ll be a beautiful thing. And when I go, it’ll be on my own terms – not from a tap on my shoulder from HR saying, “Mr. Gressel, will you come with me?”
More details on my E.S. will be forthcoming. I’m kinda excited about it, though. I’ll be able to bag his hellhole, and go give my time and energy to a company that will respect me as a person and value me as an employee. And that, my friends, is what I’ll have.
Until then...thank you for listening.
TJ
posted by Tommy G at
2:51 PM
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