Thursday Morning Slaughter
February 1st, 2009 by Kyle
Thursday was easily the most anxious, awkward, and weird day of work I could ever imagine. To adequately explain the hanging tension, I need to get you all up to speed on the last 3 months.
In November, Cessna announced they were going to layoff 600 people, about 4% of the total workforce of 15,000+. It’s regrettable, but not cataclysmic or entirely unexpected. Those people got there WARN notices and told their layoffs would be effective by the end of January, January 29th to be precise.
Flash forward a month and half. We get a friendly little e-mail filled with annoying corporate jargon, but the gist was this, “Um yeah, about those layoffs…uh, I’m gonna go ahead and fire another 2,000 of you. Okay?…Um yeah, also we’re not gonna tell you who’s getting fired until January 29th, that way everybody is too worried an preoccupied to do their jobs properly.”
Flash forward again to this past Tuesday afternoon, all Textron employees got an e-mail informing us that all our hard work and goal-achieving last year will be ignored because Textron Corporate has decided to suspend all merit raises at every business unit for all of 2009. Hurray! I love losing the correlation between my pay and performance; I bet that will do wonders for future worker productivity! And because an impersonal e-mail is quite enough of a kick to the balls to the professional work force, a wonderful Q & A sheet was added informing everyone that 2008 Bonuses will still be paid to management. Awesome! Senior Vice Presidents get extra money and I get bled out by inflation. Sweet!
This brings us to Thursday morning, January 29th. 600 People are showing up to their last day of work. 2,000 people at the bottom of their respective totem poles have a feeling they’re about to get axed. It’s makings of a weird day already. Then people start showing up to work.
Waiting in everyone’s inbox is another e-mail with the dreaded subject line and insulting euphemism “Workforce Planning Update.” The unwelcome contents of this email?
“Surprise! We’re not laying off 2,000 people today, we’re laying off 4,000. Most of you will get fired in the next 2 hours, but we’re gonna stretch this out another couple weeks to make everybody else sweat a little more. Plus, anybody still left with a job will have to take mandatory unpaid furloughs starting in March.”
To top it all off, somebody decided to check out Textron’s stock price. The result? Down 30% for the day, capping off a wonderful 85% loss in the last year. It’s a good thing us worker bees don’t get paid in stock. Oh wait! The company matching portion of our 401(k) is 100% company stock that we’re not allowed to sell for 5 years! It just keeps getting more awesome!
By 10 a.m. the tone was set. 600 people on their last day. 3,750 people are out on their asses. 250 people are dead-men walking; they just don’t know it yet. Everybody else is worried for their job, pissed that they won’t get a raise, wondering exactly how long of a furlough they can survive without losing their house, and realizing that they may never get to retire.
Where does your humble TOG land in this mess? In the latter category at the moment, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
Category: It's my life | 2 Comments »