Re: Coprorate-speak

jerry_friedman@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Peter Moylan wrote:
Sara Lorimer wrote:
Still, it's an odd image. What horizontal communication happens at the top of silos?
As I recently discovered, at the cost of my job,
...

Is sympathy in order, or are you well off out of it?

Don't bother with the sympathy. I guess I'm still carrying a bit of
anger over the method that was used to get rid of 25% of the employees.
The process took almost a year. As the year wore on, it became more and
more clear that there was a master list of who was to go - and that the
list had probably been created before the "surprise discovery" of a
budget deficit - but nobody was ever told whether they were on the list.
The way to find out was to apply for voluntary redundancy or early
voluntary retirement. If you weren't on the list, your application was
rejected. If you were, it was accepted. If you were on the list and
tried to negotiate a better deal - which is what I did - then you'd be
offered an inferior version of what you proposed, on a "take it or leave
it" basis. Those who weren't willing to gamble (only a small number,
towards the end) were thrown out under inferior conditions. The overall
approach was to terrify people into leaving "voluntarily", so that the
management could claim that there were almost no sackings.

That's the bad part. The good part is that I had been planning to retire
in three years anyway, which gave me the leverage to get a retirement
package that left me only about 20% worse off that what I'd expected on
normal retirement, i.e. I could afford to retire rather than go on a
desperate job hunt. (And it's not easy, here at least, to get yourself
taken seriously when applying for a job in your late 50s.) And, as you
suggest, I am well out of it. There was a lot of work stress caused by
understaffing, and a lot more caused by gross mismanagement. Morale was,
and still is, very bad. (People who were not targeted for redundancy,
and who are young enough and sufficiently up the "high flyer" scale to
find another job easily, are now starting to resign.)

I'd been watching the lunatics run the asylum for about the last decade.
When the politicians started running it, it was time for me to go anyway.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org

Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain
eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists.
My e-mail addresses at newcastle.edu.au will probably remain "live"
for a while, but then they will disappear without warning.
The optusnet address still has about 5 months of life left.
.

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