Yesterday, the company I work for went under an “organizational restructure”.
Thankfully, my position wasn’t laid off. I’m still new, I’ve only worked here just under three months, and I’ve been getting a lot of experience in a field I wouldn’t have otherwise worked in.
That being said, the reason I got this job was because of my best friend’s wife. When she referred me to the job, I had been unemployed for almost six months after my previous employer eliminated my position under the assumption I would be immediately re-hired by the company that took over the contract. That didn’t happen— anyway, to my main point: she had just been promoted to a leadership position right when I got hired by the company and was performing exceptionally, training new employees in her department that the company needs to help keep up with case load. Anyway.
Yesterday, because of the company’s “organizational restructuring”, many members of our leadership team were laid off. My best friend’s wife, who referred me to the job with this company, was one of those team leaders. She received a severance package including pay until the end of this current work week. Not the pay period, just this week. At least she gets to keep health insurance until the end of next month. But, still, that’s not the point.
This is extremely upsetting, not only because she didn’t deserve to be laid off, not only because she wasn’t offered a different position and/or a demotion back to her previous position under the restructuring, but mostly because it couldn’t have come at a worse time for her and my best friend, whom had already fallen on hard times for unrelated reasons.
Now, I have a really good job, and I thought I was working for an at-least-halfway-decent company, but this has definitely given me some second thoughts. As a frequenter of this subreddit, I wanted to share this experience as a cautionary tale.
I’m currently updating my resume and will be actively seeking employment at other companies with the new skills I’ve earned in the less than 3 months working at this company.
No loyalty given, no loyalty earned. I learned that the hard way after my last career of 10+ years was cut short by a corporate decision.
Big companies don’t care about us. They care about their bottom line. They’d rather eliminate “redundant” leadership and keep hiring new people to do minimal-effort-required work and produce minimal results. I’m sad that I now feel this way about my new company.
But hopefully whoever sees this post gives their current work situation a second thought:
Are you absolutely indispensable?
Even if you bring incredible skills and work ethics to the table, do your superiors care enough not to lay you off without offer of remedy when the going gets tough?
We all need to think about this.
This is a worker’s market. We have the power. We need to make every industry understand that, without us: nothing gets done. Everything comes to a stand still. Nobody makes money. Everybody loses.