The longer my wife and I are unemployed, the more I realize just how shitty our previous companies treated us when we were laid off.
My wife’s company had record high profits because of the pandemic but still continued to pay everyone crap and was extremely short staff. However, her department wasn’t doing as well and the company decided to let go of around 300 employees the same day they released their earnings report so it wouldn’t affect their shareholders and stock price. The small company I worked at raised $100 million in funding just 5 months prior to letting go of a huge chunk of their employees. They were having issues raising more money and just decided to let us go. Both of our companies didn’t give us a days notice, we were just let go of on the spot and they provided none of the assistance or resources they offered to find another job.
Now, a couple months later, we’re still struggling to find jobs after applying to hundreds of positions. I was in a Junior level tech job so it’s very hard to find a company willing to take a chance on me, especially against the hundreds of other applicants. We both got Covid and had to stop looking for work for a while until we recovered. We’ve gone through our severance and now dipping into our savings. We’ve also been fighting with the DES because they keep denying our unemployment claims because we received a severance and we’re trying to prove we don’t have anymore money.
All of this has been incredibly frustrating to deal with, especially when I see these companies posting about how they care about their employees, their new partnerships, etc. I just don’t know what to do at this point.