Burning Bridges

I have a very bad habit. I know I should stop, but I can’t.

What is this bad habit? Do I drink too much? No, just a glass of wine on the weekends.  Spend too much on clothes? You betcha. Eat too much chocolate? Guilty pleasure.

No, the habit I refer to is my strange fascination with articles on how to deal with a layoff. You know the kind: All sorts of original advice like you should network to get another job after being laid off. (Really? You mean I can’t rob a bank.)

I know it’s silly. All it does it bring me back to that awful day and the 16 months I spent lonely, stressed and unemployed.

Maybe I do it because I’m looking for some comfort or explanation of why I so rudely treated by former employer.

No, instead I get nuggets like this: “You should know it’s just as embarrassing and gut-wrenching for the company: They don’t have the money to pay you.”

Oh, right: Corporations are people, too. I’ll go out on limb and bet the writer, Rebecca Thorman of U.S. News & World Report’s Money page, is going to vote for Mitt Romney.

My first thought was, has this chick ever been laid off? Does she know how it really feels? Probably not.

And that wasn’t the only advice this moron gave that got my blood boiling. She said that we shouldn’t burn our bridges with our former employer. Hey, I think my former bosses burned their bridges with me when they laid me off.

Yes, I understand we should be calm when our world is collapsing around us. I’m not advocating any kind of verbal or physical violence. Not at all.

I admit, I did snap a bit when I was brutally told I was being laid off. But I never raised my voice or swore at anyone. I told my boss I didn’t want to talk to him, and I also snapped at a former co-worker who I later found out threw me under the bus to save one of her office buddies. Even then, I said, “Don’t talk to me. You have a job.” Not that bad, really.

My biggest issue is with the advice that we should take our layoffs lightly and go quietly into a long stretch of unemployment, a severe drop in income, possible foreclosure and bankruptcy without so much as a peep of protest. Not bloody likely. I say, make your displeasure known to your douche-bag former bosses. It’s probably the last chance you’ll ever get. They've already laid you off, so they can't do anything else to you.

What about how the layoffs were handled? Why was I laid off when people who had less time in the company and made more than me kept on? I’ll tell you why: Because managers are allowed to cherry-pick who stays and goes and that’s extremely unfair.

But how can I expect someone who has never been laid off but yet gets to tell us how we’re supposed to feel to understand?

Corporate Feudalism

Since the GOP seems ready to nominate the ultimate corporate overlord, Mitt “I like to fire people” Romney, as its presidential candidate, it’s time to discuss Corporate Feudalism.

What is Corporate Feudalism? It’s the concept (invented by me, of course. I have a lot of time on my hands) that companies in the U.S. are built not innovation or inventing goods and services that can help society in some way, but on the perpetuation of their own dominance and oversized paychecks. It’s all about keeping themselves and their handpicked cronies in power so they can rake in mega salaries and big fat bonus checks every year. Just like Feudal Lords of yesteryear.

Even after taxpayers, their serfs, had to bail them out from their own stupidity, Wall Street hucksters shamelessly pocketed six-figure bonuses. This after many had thrown workers out on the street to keep their own jobs so they could continue their own lavish lifestyles. Not one has been held to account for their criminal actions. That’s despicable.

Oh, Republicans say this class warfare, that we’re jealous of their wealth. Not so.

All of us know rich people. We work with them, are friends with them and they are members of our families. Good for them if they have beaucoup bucks. I always say, if you are going to be jealous of what another person makes, you will be a very unhappy person.

No, we irritates us is the power their money gives them. The power to change laws in their favor, the power to hire us and then dump us when we become “surplus.” (If we were surplus, why did you hire us in the first place?)

Name one U.S. company that consistently comes up with innovative products? Apple is the only one I can think of. (Although I wish they innovate a little slower. I just bought an iPhone 4 and now the company wants to come out with an iPhone5.) Of course, Apple has managed to steer away from paying most of its U.S. taxes.

I saw this at work at my former workplace. They cut us to reduce expenses, yet are they profitable? From what I can see they haven’t come up with anything new or innovative. It’s just the same old, same old from the same drunken morons who have always run that place and a bunch of new hires getting overworked for a pittance.

And I don't buy the theory that just because someone ran a successful business they can run the country. Sure, in business, you don't want to run a deficit. With a country, sometimes you have to in order to provide essential services to its citizens. What's Romney going to do when he sees how much Social Security is costing the country? Fire everyone over age 65?

For most American corporations, it’s about keeping upper management in power and living in luxury while the rest of us can barely afford to pay rent and keep our families fed and housed. There is no balance. The entire system is tilted in their favor. It's never good for any civil society to have so much power rest with one, relatively small group.

Corporations whine about too much regulation, but with so many politicians of both parties beholden to Wall Street dollars, it’s unlikely they will get more regulation.

And it’s not as if regulation has stopped them from raking in record profits while discarding workers in record numbers. What are they worried about?

Look, I understand companies have to make profits and to make money you have to take risks. I get that. But when they take risks that fail, they cannot expect taxpayers—the same people they jettison when it suits them—to pay for their mistakes.

The most surprising aspect of the JPMorgan debacle was not that those boobs actually managed to lose $2 billion in a scheme even they couldn’t comprehend—it was that upper management actually acknowledged their fault (albeit not right away) and that some high-ranking executives actually took responsibility and resigned. (One of them was a woman from New Jersey. Perhaps now she can go on The Real Housewives of New Jersey. They need someone to smack down Teresa.)

We all must pay taxes if we want a country with a top-notch military, good schools and solid infrastructure. But all corporations want to do is avoid paying taxes. Have we become Tax Dodge Nation? It’s not like they are using the money they would have paid in taxes to fund some great new product that helps people live better lives or puts more people to work. No, instead the money is going for obscene salaries and bonuses.

Well, enough of my rant about Corporate Feudalism. Let me check my wallet to see if I have enough money to buy lunch at McDonalds.

Here We Go Again…Part 2

It was on the printer near my office cubicle. It was an agenda for a big meeting the big kahunas at work attended recently.

Naturally, my nosey nature took over and I glanced at it (hey, who left it there for all to see?). Not for long, but long enough to see some interesting agenda items, such as reviewing staffing levels to see if any positions needed to be cut (and to be fair, if positions needed to be added and where).

No, I haven’t mentioned to this anyone else in the office. For one, the deadline for these decisions, if any, aren’t until October.

Reality Check: I can’t say I’m surprised. We have a new CEO and of course it’s his mandate to review the entire company structure to ferret out inefficiencies and find areas where money can be better spent to boost revenues. Frankly, if he didn’t do that, he wouldn’t be doing his job.

Or it could be mere busy work for upper management types. What better kind than screwing around with the lives of underlings. Gives them a sense or power, I guess. They get to play God.

Nevertheless, at this point, it’s in the discussion stage. Who knows what will happen between now and the fall? He may make radical changes, or none at all. And no one knows where those changes, if any, will occur. And it’s pretty obvious that management is no rush to make these decisions, that these discussions are not being done out of desperation and panic as it was at my former employer.

So getting worried at this time is probably premature. Yet it’s just another disheartening reminder that our professional fates are being discussed in some meeting room somewhere by a group of mostly white, middle-aged males. Not very comforting.

The best we can hope for is that any dismissals are done in a respectful, thoughtful manner for the individuals whose jobs are on the line. That those of us who may lose our jobs aren’t being laid off because some douchebag supervisor wants to get rid of us for personal reasons so he or she can keep his or her incompetent lapdogs or drinking buddies on staff.


Reality Check Again: Let's not get too negative. Negative thoughts can become negative reality. There may be massive layoffs, there may none. No one, including the new CEO, knows at this point.

So what can I do? Well, this may just be the push I need to update my resume.