long term employees fired?

[SZR48207]

Originally Posted By: DoubleWasp
...Like many tech companies facing temporary economic decline at the time, they impressed investors and shareholders through bombastic cost cutting through a lot of throat cutting...




See this is what reinforces my belief that publicly traded companies are completely in it for short term gain. I'm even a MBA holding millennial who many people would despise based on those 2 attributes alone. I've studied management theory and gone through finance classes and I just can't convince myself that a company going public does anything but put short term pressure on management to reach quarterly expectations.

And in today's world, there's really no better way to improve the bottom line than by cutting employees or reducing benefits. If you believe that employees DO gain knowledge about the job and that experience IS worth something, then you'll agree that cutting the high paid employees is always done for short term gain.

One great, but sad, example was at one of my past employers where my performance bonus was tied to the stock performance. Explain to me again how my individual goals and achievement in my lowly department had even a feather's weight of impact on the publicly traded share price? So you could work your butt off one quarter, but if any of the outside influences caused the stock price to fall slightly, I'd get dinged at review time.

 

[Alfred_B]

Originally Posted By: Reddy45
Originally Posted By: DoubleWasp
...Like many tech companies facing temporary economic decline at the time, they impressed investors and shareholders through bombastic cost cutting through a lot of throat cutting...




See this is what reinforces my belief that publicly traded companies are completely in it for short term gain. I'm even a MBA holding millennial who many people would despise based on those 2 attributes alone. I've studied management theory and gone through finance classes and I just can't convince myself that a company going public does anything but put short term pressure on management to reach quarterly expectations.

And in today's world, there's really no better way to improve the bottom line than by cutting employees or reducing benefits. If you believe that employees DO gain knowledge about the job and that experience IS worth something, then you'll agree that cutting the high paid employees is always done for short term gain.

One great, but sad, example was at one of my past employers where my performance bonus was tied to the stock performance. Explain to me again how my individual goals and achievement in my lowly department had even a feather's weight of impact on the publicly traded share price? So you could work your butt off one quarter, but if any of the outside influences caused the stock price to fall slightly, I'd get dinged at review time.

Your performance didn't have a direct impact on the share price but I'm sure everyone in the organization had a similar performance bonus. If you are an MBA, you know that one theory about improving shareholder value is to tie compensation to share performance (which is where the shareholder value is). A publicly traded company has one goal -- maximize shareholder value. There are short term and long term ways of accomplishing this. Short term is labor cost management rhough layoffs, benefit reductions, etc. Long term is R&D, M&A, etc.

 

[Mr Nice]

Notice how a stock is up when a big company announces thousands of layoffs.

Lowering payroll is the quickest way to improve your financial metrics.

 

[SZR48207]

Originally Posted By: Alfred_B
Originally Posted By: Reddy45
Originally Posted By: DoubleWasp
...Like many tech companies facing temporary economic decline at the time, they impressed investors and shareholders through bombastic cost cutting through a lot of throat cutting...




See this is what reinforces my belief that publicly traded companies are completely in it for short term gain. I'm even a MBA holding millennial who many people would despise based on those 2 attributes alone. I've studied management theory and gone through finance classes and I just can't convince myself that a company going public does anything but put short term pressure on management to reach quarterly expectations.

And in today's world, there's really no better way to improve the bottom line than by cutting employees or reducing benefits. If you believe that employees DO gain knowledge about the job and that experience IS worth something, then you'll agree that cutting the high paid employees is always done for short term gain.

One great, but sad, example was at one of my past employers where my performance bonus was tied to the stock performance. Explain to me again how my individual goals and achievement in my lowly department had even a feather's weight of impact on the publicly traded share price? So you could work your butt off one quarter, but if any of the outside influences caused the stock price to fall slightly, I'd get dinged at review time.

Your performance didn't have a direct impact on the share price but I'm sure everyone in the organization had a similar performance bonus. If you are an MBA, you know that one theory about improving shareholder value is to tie compensation to share performance (which is where the shareholder value is). A publicly traded company has one goal -- maximize shareholder value. There are short term and long term ways of accomplishing this. Short term is labor cost management rhough layoffs, benefit reductions, etc. Long term is R&D, M&A, etc.


I know why it was tied in that way, but I guess I just can't be convinced that going public is a good idea.

 

[Doog]

Originally Posted By: motor_oil_madman
How come businesses let go of employees who have been working at the same place for 20 years and they're fixing to retire in the next 5 years? Is it because they are paying them too much and need to replace them with workers who don't make as much?


yes

 

[artificialist]

Originally Posted By: Doog
Originally Posted By: motor_oil_madman
How come businesses let go of employees who have been working at the same place for 20 years and they're fixing to retire in the next 5 years? Is it because they are paying them too much and need to replace them with workers who don't make as much?


yes


The business may also have a pension system, and they don't want anybody to collect a big pension, so they limit the number of years an employee can work at that job.

However, they don't try to limit what kind of pension a CEO or other top executive can get.

 

[JTK]

Originally Posted By: motor_oil_madman
How come businesses let go of employees who have been working at the same place for 20 years and they're fixing to retire in the next 5 years? Is it because they are paying them too much and need to replace them with workers who don't make as much?


I've seen it many times in the 20yrs I've been with my company and it's heart-breaking. Almost every one of them was a great resource with lots of knowledge and they lived, breathed and ate their roll. All were higher levels of management or high up in the salaried technical realm. A big reason why I've avoided ladder climbing.

 

[opus1]

Originally Posted By: JTK
...A big reason why I've avoided ladder climbing.
Maybe, maybe not. In my case, had I been on the managerial ladder, I might not have been put into the position of having to decide whether to take a "voluntary" buyout right now.

 

[Mr Nice]

Originally Posted By: JTK
Originally Posted By: motor_oil_madman
How come businesses let go of employees who have been working at the same place for 20 years and they're fixing to retire in the next 5 years? Is it because they are paying them too much and need to replace them with workers who don't make as much?


I've seen it many times in the 20yrs I've been with my company and it's heart-breaking. Almost every one of them was a great resource with lots of knowledge and they lived, breathed and ate their roll. All were higher levels of management or high up in the salaried technical realm. A big reason why I've avoided ladder climbing.


At some jobs its better to be a worker ant than a manager thats a target for RIF.

A one hospital I occasionally visited they got rid of a manager with 33 years at the hospital.... also a few other long term employees.

 

[firemachine69]

Originally Posted By: Mr Nice
Originally Posted By: JTK
Originally Posted By: motor_oil_madman
How come businesses let go of employees who have been working at the same place for 20 years and they're fixing to retire in the next 5 years? Is it because they are paying them too much and need to replace them with workers who don't make as much?


I've seen it many times in the 20yrs I've been with my company and it's heart-breaking. Almost every one of them was a great resource with lots of knowledge and they lived, breathed and ate their roll. All were higher levels of management or high up in the salaried technical realm. A big reason why I've avoided ladder climbing.


At some jobs its better to be a worker ant than a manager thats a target for RIF.

A one hospital I occasionally visited they got rid of a manager with 33 years at the hospital.... also a few other long term employees.




They'd have to pay me triple to even consider being a permanent manager.

 

[DoubleWasp]

Management was always a major target during cutbacks.

We were given a lot of interesting names during the worst of that period.

The odd thing was that most of them centered around Harry Potter and Twilight for some reason. "Death Eaters", "Dementors", "The Volturi" etc.

 

[firemachine69]

Originally Posted By: DoubleWasp
Management was always a major target during cutbacks.

We were given a lot of interesting names during the worst of that period.

The odd thing was that most of them centered around Harry Potter and Twilight for some reason. "Death Eaters", "Dementors", "The Volturi" etc.




I've honestly yet to see a medium to large company that wasn't overloaded with useless managers fighting over how the money comes out of the pot (even though it all comes from the same pot...

)

 

[DoubleWasp]

I used to call that "two dogs trying to ____ a styrafoam cooler".

 

[pitzel]

I scanned this thread for a bit, and didn't see the big elephant in the room mentioned, and that is, health insurance premiums.

Older employees are almost certain to push the business's health insurance costs up. Much cheaper to hire young men from India on guest worker visas (visas which are held by the employer, not by the employee) who can be deported if they develop cancer, than to have a company's rates rise because an employee or two develops a serious issue.

Its a very serious issue. There's only one Presidential candidate who is at least talking about putting an end to it. Vote accordingly.

 

[pitzel]

Originally Posted By: xfactor9
You didn't mention what industry you're in. I think that matters. In tech (software), you rarely see engineers over the age of 45. They either become managers who do less technical work, or they become high-level architects, or they're let go. As a manager, one relies more on knowledge and interpersonal skills, and less on mental sharpness. In your 20s is when you're smartest and able to solve the most complex technical problems. (Einstein was in his 20s when he made his important discoveries.) By mid-40s, you're not as sharp anymore.


The tech sector has largely been a matter of not hiring US citizens at all. Do this for the past 15 years (last major hiring of Citizens was in the late 1990s/early 2000s), and most of the workforce is essentially young foreign nationals.

The young and foreign can also be "asked" to work those 84 hour weeks when a product needs to be shoved out the door. A 40-year-old can't or won't tolerate that because they probably have a family.

Quote:

Also, recent grads are more proficient in the latest technologies. Grads are also easier for the company to shape and mold into what the companies wants, too. Older workers may resist if they dont agree with what the company wants to do.


Sounds like they have a preference for slaves. No wonder what's been coming out of the tech sector has been complete garbage over the past number of years. The best creativity is done when people are free. The "south" didn't exactly thrive under slavery, and we know that it ultimately was unsustainable, if not completely immoral.

Quote:

Then there's cost, both in salary and in healthcare, vacation, sick days, etc.


Especially healthcare.

 

[DoubleWasp]

It's not about restoring slavery, it's about advancing slavery.

I know from First Contact experience that the goal of tomorrow is to have educated slaves. There are plenty of wealthy people who stay up at night salivating over the thought of a doctor, engineer, or other educated person being absolutely content to work for nickels and never achieving anything but professional success (without financial success).

The general idea is to slowly reduce expectations by taking away as much as possible until people just arrive at the reality that the only point of becoming an advanced professional is the satisfaction of achievement. They're absolutely in love with teachers, since most of them are already on the program.

More and more degress are both expensive and worthless everyday. Can't say whether these desires are Monday morning quarterbacking, or if the program is working.

 

[Shannow]

DoubleWasp, ouch...one of the best engineers that I ever worked with said that the problem with engineers was that they'd do it all for nothing.

 

[artificialist]

Originally Posted By: DoubleWasp
It's not about restoring slavery, it's about advancing slavery.

I know from First Contact experience that the goal of tomorrow is to have educated slaves. There are plenty of wealthy people who stay up at night salivating over the thought of a doctor, engineer, or other educated person being absolutely content to work for nickels and never achieving anything but professional success (without financial success).

If the people have enough brainpower to know engineering, they might have enough brainpower to know slavery.

I suspect one method used is to sell the idea that everyone needs to get married, have 2.5 kids, buy a huge house in suburbia, and have 2 premium cars in front of it. If someone like that is at risk of losing their job, they will keep working hard to keep their job even if they have to work longer hours at lower wages. If someone is single and living a minimalist lifestyle, they might be able to look for better jobs or go on strike.

 

[DoubleWasp]

To this very day, there is a debate over whether the person who came to this country under stiff obligation are "indentured servants" or "indentured slaves".

The intelligent will be the first people to tell you that since those people "had a choice", they were in fact legally employed, and not slaves.

That is, for those who consider dropping dead in a Potato Famine, becoming a servant with an impossible debt to pay, or jail to be "choices".

 

[Shannow]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...ning-to-workers

Quote:
Two weeks ago, he and more than 50 other fitters and electricians from CUB were summoned to a meeting at a hotel and told that their jobs had been re-contracted to another service subcontractor.

Management explained they could reapply, but one look at the new contracts was eye-opening. It wasn’t just that their existing conditions had been stripped, or that the new contracts contained nightmarish clauses – including one in which management could oblige them into medical or psychiatric treatments, at their own expense – they were also being told they could come back to work at jobs they’d been doing for years if they accepted pay cuts of up to 65%.


Quote:
CUB brew the Carlton beers, Pure Blonde, VB and the Bulmer’s ciders – these are not products vulnerable to competition from downloads or an app, and CUB yet dominates the Australian beer market, owning five of the 10 biggest brands and, with VB, Australia’s single most popular. CUB’s international owner, the London-based SABMiller, is hardly facing tough times, either. It’s maintaining US$22bn a year in revenue as it prepares to sell itself to another beer giant, Anheuser-Busch InBev, in a deal worth US$104bn. It’s certainly not burdened with a heavy tax bill: last year, SABMiller miraculously generated zero taxable income in Australia, despite recording A$2bn in total earnings. That’s a lot of money not to pay tax on.