(no subject)

[trinityofone]

Myself and more than twenty others were laid off from my company yesterday with no warning. We were called into meetings in groups of about five at a time, chatted up by the human resources ladies, and then abruptly let go. We were then escorted from the building.

This is a handout that was in our "bye bye!" packets. Don't you just love that exclamation mark? So cheery!

I'm still sort of numb and in shock. I can't believe I didn't get up and go to work today. I hate the idea that I have to start the long, annoying process of looking for work again. I actually liked my job. I was good at my job. But with the economy the way it is, my (former) company was forced to eliminate my job.

Thank you, George W. Bush, for this unique opportunity to be unemployed.

Comments

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

They can fire you for no reason whatsoever. Where American employers get themselves in trouble is the bizarre things they do to you in the process of -- or leading up to -- your being fired. That's what an attorney told me after I talked to him about my last job.

[jessikast]

Don't they even have to give any notice? At my job, if they do dismiss me (unless, like, I don't know, the whole business suddenly dissapears), it's either after a disciplinary process wherein I get three formal warnings, or if I'm made redundant I get given the same amount of notice as I would have to give if I were resigning.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I'm not an attorney, but from the conversation I had with my attorney ... a lot of companies have company policies. That's where notice and so forth comes from. Their policies may say that you have to have three warnings and notice -- but the company required by law to follow their own policies. The policies are more like guidelines than actual rules. But they are developed by employee satisfaction research and are designed to prevent expensive lawsuits.

Often corporations circumvent their own policies. They'll find ways to give an employee bad reviews to justify firing them, even if they're doing a good job. The bad review is really a warning, "We're going to find a way to get rid of you, so start looking."

What you're supposed to do is find another job and save them the trouble of firing you. Then you show up telling people about this excellent opportunity, you can't pass it up, they pat you on the back and throw you a goodbye party. A polite fiction is maintained.

If people don't get the message then things get really ugly. The employment law attorney had encountered some really crazy stuff. People were deliberately overloaded with work so they'd do poorly and get a bad review; being moved to a department where they have no expertise; reducing their job responsibilities to almost nil and then writing them up for doing nothing; involving customers who are also personal friends in elaborate schemes to create a customer service issue, forcing the employee to handle things beyond their pay grade and then using that to fire them; suddenly cracking down on "issues" that hadn't been an issue before they elected to fire that employee.

Sometimes the effort in circumventing company policy creates abusive situations. That's where the attorneys get involved.

The only people in America who have any kind of job security are union employees.

[(Anonymous)]

Love it when I drop really important words:

...but the company is not required by law to follow their own policies.