On Thursday afternoon, the penny dropped. For all the blood that followed, it may as well have been a guillotine. Level Eleven shed one-third of all staff and the writing department, being the largest in the company, lost six people from the team of 18. It may be remembered as the Great November Redundancy of 2006. Who thought it would come to this so early?
The fallout is this: anger, disappointment, contemplative depression and a stark recognition of betrayal. For some people, the whole gamut, for others just a concentrated form of one thing or another. Ironically, the sombre mood from this has led to lower productivity from the kept ones, perhaps putting them in danger of the same fate.
And yet, there is this: I am five months into a six-month contract. Many others were at the same stage of their contract also. Can one really expect the contract to be renewed? You would hope for a a renewal, but you could not expect it. Many of the shafted were merely asked to work out the rest of their contract. At this point, they should have been looking for another job anyway.
However, there is also this: a girl at work accepted a demotion in return for a guarantee of another six months work, the reason being that she wanted to move out of home and then later next year go travelling. Management knew that these decisions rested on their action and they agreed to keep her for another six months. An agreement they broke on Thursday, which occurred because they had not yet forged a new contract.
Further to everything is this: the official line was that the board of directors told management to cut costs by a third. The directive came about ten days ago, according to reports. This means that for ten days they knew about this AND DIDN'T WARN US. You know, a little transparency goes a long way. They thought they were preventing a breakout of anxiety whereas all along their methods have caused more anxiety than they could have created if they had been frank with us to begin with.
There is a theory, also, that they may have known about this longer than they let on. If this is true, then maybe they should have scaled back the $1000, 7-person managers lunch they had the other week. Maybe they should stop expensing coffee to the company when we have a coffee machine and everyone else who doesn't like Nescafe buys their own. Maybe they should all take a $10K pay cut and keep one more person on.
And I am angry about this: at the company meeting on Friday afternoon, our managing director stood up to express regret about the losses. In the next sentence he mentioned that the focus groups have responded well to our product and that they are in talks with a big telco, which will consolidate our product and will probably generate more revenue than anticipated. Further to that, he added that he will be fielding suggestions for the Christmas party. Beyond insensitive. He also said the words "moving forward" about six times, which is an unfortunate indicator of managerspeak entering our work system.
A question about loyalty was deflected to our CEO, full of bullshit at best, devoid of compassion at worst. He basically used the refrain "the losses we've had to suffer were no reflection on the level of work put in by the people we had to let go. Our next goal is to get to the February deadline and we'll see where we go from there." THEN WHAT? HUH?
I am going to have a serious talk to this man and I will find out whether he has a heart under his pile-of-shit exterior. Either I'm going to get myself fired or I am going to see some change. Or maybe nothing. If nothing, then what can I do but seek my own path?
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