The company I work for conducts manufacturing operations for the defense industry, virtually 24/7. We attained record profits in the last quarter, which resulted in each hourly employee being provided with a single doughnut, some room-temperature barbeque, and an insulated coffee cup. Salaried employees get profit sharing.
A few days ago, each shift had a meeting with the plant GM, who's also a corporate VP. He stood up there and gave us this long “mea culpa” speech. The content bore a lot of resemblances to Zuckerberg's speech, but ultimately it boiled down to this: due to a disconnect between forecasting and Operations, or possibly a failure on the part of the Marketing and Sales team… or possibly a failure on the part of our commercial distributors to move product… whatever the cause, we needed to “pause production.”
Consequently, all of the employees in the two buildings that compromise the value stream will get two weeks off without pay, 19 November – 05 December. Additionally, our holiday shutdown (typically the days from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day) will start a day early, also without pay. Employees can burn PTO to maintain their pay, and go up to -20 hours in the hole. For an employee with less than 5 years, it will take them approximately three months to work out of that deficit. The furlough is scheduled in such a way that hourly employees will be able to file for unemployment, which in my state amounts to a whopping $320. Per week. Before taxes.
Now, our union contract has provisions for layoffs, which are to be conducted by a plant-wide excess process according to seniority. There are NO provisions for “production pauses” or “furloughs;” that language doesn't exist in the contract. Union leadership has not yet filed a grievance or done anything other than a social media post.
The best part? We had our meeting on the same day that we received our free annual holiday frozen turkey. I guess I'll be able to feed my family for a couple of days.