Gone are the days of being laid off and being able to at least sign up for unemployment insurance. Now they just ride on top of you 24/7 in order to pressure you to quit.
I’m working a terrible customer service role to get by right now with how bad the job market is. Every 6 months mid level management realizes that there’s a problem with payroll bloat. Instead of cutting back on stupid things or just laying people off, they try to get rid of us another way. Their strategy is to change everything around in a day, they move the goal post for our KPIs way past anything that is humanly possible, they put all hands on deck for supervisors to harass/micromanage employees, they point fingers, punch down, play the blame game, and most of all they give out correction action like it’s candy….The result of this is a sickeningnly toxic environment. Employees (including me) end up breaking down from the stress. It’s horrible. Once the payroll bloat goes away from everyone leaving, they swap everything back to business as usual and then have the people who stayed on deal with the brunt of the work.
This sort of hostility isn’t by any means new, but I’m seeing it be more and more common amongst employers who desperately need to cut down. They won’t even touch layoffs, they’ll just bully everyone out of the workplace.