Rant I guess – I’m so glad I found this community. My previous employer – to whom I dedicated heart and soul for 4.5 years – closed our local office and laid off/lost all employees – three resigned before the office closed, one retired, myself and one other continued to work virtually for a few months longer. That other employee left six weeks before I went on leave. I agreed to transfer to another city after returning to work following planned medical leave, but during medical leave decided that uprooting my family wasn’t worth the money or career and told them so. That effectively ended my employment before returning to work from leave. I requested unemployment which they denied. Legally they could. I lost the job in the other city when I decided not to relocate and although they paid unemployment for the other workers who requested it, they did not do so for me for the reason listed.
Four of the six of us ultimately stopped working there solely because they moved our office a few hours away – we would have continued as usual if they hadn’t. Info – we have several offices around the state that operate independent of our main office. Our office that closed was an independent office. The office that opened a few hours away is an independent office. So it’s not that they’re bringing the office closer for supervisory reasons. The crime rate and living costs in this city are better than in the city where they relocated the office. The choices they made were the worst for the humans who had worked for them for years but best for their bottom line (read: $$$ costs). They knew they could hire people in the other city so shut us down (no severance or anything).
One of the employees who resigned and the other who retired were probably going to leave anyway, but in the other employees, they lost a combined 18 years of experience (years each of us were there respectively – 8, 5, 4, 1) in a specialized field that is high stress and in rare demand but of vital importance.
The organization lost 20 people out of approximately 50 from summer 2020 – winter 2021 – some of its longest-tenured members. On the other hand, they have some positives – they increased wages finally (while I was on leave so didn’t benefit from it), allow office members to bring dogs (other animals on rare occasion) and children to the office, and were fairly proactive in instituting remote work at pandemic onset. Then again, we had strict work schedules we had to adhere to and tedious timekeeping that had to be done or were threatened with punitive action (I.e. not getting paid), when I got into a car accident, I was asked how long it would take me to get to work (I’d been with the organization about 10 months at that point), and we were issued ultimatums regularly that, despite overwhelming amounts of work, we were expected to meet no matter how our workload varied.
ETA formatting and comment: although losing the income was a blow I had to mentally prepare for, my spouse and I were doing okay already while I was on leave. Ultimately, leaving the job has been much better for my family and me, although I loved the job and would have continued to work it until I retired.