Layoffitis

How does it feel to be laid off?  Let me tell you (since I’ve broken that cherry twice).

Some days you’ll be okay; other days, depressed, despairing and angry. No, you are not bipolar. You’re just suffering from layoffitis, a condition brought on by a permanently droopy economy and duplicitous bosses and co-workers.

Here are the other symptoms:

• You alternate between periods of optimism (“I can get a job!”) and pessimism (I’m a loser!).
• Occasional crying jags.
• An uncontrollable urge to smack rich white people (but you don’t, of course. I’m speaking figuratively). 
• A loss of confidence in your abilities, believing your career is over. 
• Sleeplessness, or waking up in the early dawn, when the sky is a charcoal grey, worrying over whether you will end up penniless and homeless.
• Frequent stomachaches.
• Weird dreams. I mean, really, really weird dreams.
• Being in a constant state of anxiety.
• Lethargy. (“What’s the point of even trying?”)
• You feel sad and lonely at times.
• A loss of hope.

It’s doubtful the American Psychiatric Association will ever endorse a diagnosis of layoffitis. The symptoms are too much like general depression and/or anxiety disorder to make it its own separate ailment.

However, unless the economy improves and employers deign to hire the long-term unemployed, more people will begin to suffer form layoffitis. There will be too many of us to ignore.

Long-term (or repeated periods of) unemployment has a real psychological effect on individuals.

I should know.

CEO Shaming

There’s a pervasive and somewhat disturbing trend sweeping our society today. It’s called shaming. Nearly anyone is fair game: fat people, skinny people, bad spouses, even pets that have accidents on upholstery.

I’m not sure what the purpose of this is. Sometimes, I admit, it’s done in jest. Other times, it’s clearly being done to be mean and hurtful. With all the social media outlets today, shaming someone is quick and easy and very public.

If someone is overweight, will shaming them change their behavior? Isn’t someone’s weight between that person and their physician?

Even sillier is the shaming of pets. Can they read those shaming signs? Do you know of any dogs on Twitter? How are dogs to know the difference between grass and carpet? Yet I have to admit, some of the shaming pet photos I’ve seen are pretty hilarious.

If we are going to shame a group of people, why not shame those truly worthy of scorn? Like CEOs, specifically those head honchoes who lay off thousands of workers while pulling down seven-figure salaries. Or those whose companies were bailed out by taxpayers yet still rake in million-dollar bonuses.

Something like this:

“I’d laid off 2,000 workers yet I still get paid $7 million a year. What a country!”

“Taxpayers bailed out my flailing company. I kept my job and got a bonus of $5 million!”

“My firm went bankrupt. Do I care? Nah, I got a multi-million-dollar golden parachute.”

You get my drift. Perhaps the most absurd incantation of this “Let them eat cake” mindset was the CEO who argued that rich people were in danger of being attacked by the lowly masses stirred up by the Occupy Wall Street movement. He even went so far as to compare his plight to the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

He was, of course, rightly slammed for his views. Let’s put aside the distasteful and reprehensible comparison to the Holocaust, which isn’t even worthy of comment, but how can he be afraid of the rather toothless Occupy Wall Street gang? That movement was started by privileged white kids upset because they couldn’t get a six-figure job right out of college and Daddy turned off the cash funnel. Haven’t heard much from that crowd lately have we? Well, it’s probably because with the stock market doing a bit better, those spoiled toffs have gotten their big fat paychecks and urban lofts. They never really cared about the millions of long-term unemployed or those struggling to make ends meet on ever-shrinking wages.

So if we are going to shame people, let’s call out those who are behaving in truly appalling ways. But how can you shame someone who has no sense of shame?

4 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Laid Off

Since this is my second go-around with the whole laid-off thing-y, I figured it’s time to clue you in on a few facts nobody else will tell you:

The company doesn’t care about you. We’ve all long ago dispensed of the notion of 30 years with the same company and the gold-watch dinner. Today, that seems like a quaint relic of the “Downton Abbey” era when people dressed for dinner and nobody thought knocking down three martinis before bedtime was a bad thing.

More shocking is how ruthless, cunning and callous companies are when it comes to slicing away staff for the sake of supposedly saving the bottom line. (By company, I mean upper management, the people in the C-suite, who are somehow protected from layoffs even though it was probably their boneheaded schemes that led the company to financial ruin.)

What an example? At my former company, they laid off a woman who had just returned that day to work after completing treatment for breast cancer. I think they waited until she returned to lay off all of us. According to a distant cousin who specializes in employment law, companies can do that. But just because they can doesn’t make it any less deplorable.

So whenever you hear some corporate tool mew about how bad he feels about having to let good workers go, don’t believe it. They care only about protecting themselves (and their golden parachutes when the company eventually folds) and their handpicked puppets. They don’t care about you, your family or the career you’ve built. They only care about themselves and the company, never the workers.

And I cringe every time I read or hear someone say how hard it is for a company to lay off workers or for a boss to tell a worker he or she is being laid off. Who is really getting the worse deal here? Who walks out of the room without a job? Case closed.

Companies are only concerned if it becomes public knowledge that they’ve laid off staff. It makes them look bad (for good reason). Both times when was I laid off, it was reported in the press the next day and my former bosses were livid. They went completely bonkers over the reporting of the truth. (Neither leak came from me.)

So you see, companies don’t care about you. After you’ve been laid off they want you gone, never to be seen or heard from again. Sort of like “You’re dead to me Fredo” without the bullet to the back of the head.

You’ve been lied to. Both times I was laid off, I was told it had nothing to do with my work performance. Well, OK, then, why was I laid off and some do-nothing boob kept on staff?

Because here’s how it works: Upper management tells middle management it has to cut staff. Middle managers (or the All White Male Club as I like to call them) sits in some conference room and discusses who stays and who goes. And that’s where the devious malarkey begins.

How devious? At my former workplace, the head of our department (an egotistical fanboy who has somehow conned upper management into thinking he is oh-so-great; he's not) sent around an email detailing new duties for the staff. These changes, he said, were meant to free up the editors for major projects. HA! It was a total lie. In hindsight, that memo was really a guide to who was going to be laid off and who was retained. Nearly all who had duties taken away (like me) were laid off. I even had to teach someone else how to do my job. Nice, huh? 

Remember, these are human beings with hidden agendas. They are out not only to save themselves, but their sycophants and lapdogs. It’s only natural they would take this opportunity to dropkick anyone who, although a stellar worker, may not be their favorite.

Let’s not forget we, the potentially laid-off employees, never know what is said in those malicious meetings or the reasons we were given the boot while others were spared. We'll never know the truth and that's torture.

So you see it’s a system that promotes favoritism and is tailor-made to be unfair. It’s totally fugazy.

You’ve probably been stabbed in the back. There she goes, being paranoid again. But going back to number 2, don’t you think there’s a better than good chance you were given the shaft by a former colleague or boss?

At my former former workplace, the day before I was laid off, a group of former former co-workers had a meeting with my nasty former former boss. I learned later that they argued in favor of keeping one colleague while throwing the rest of us under the bus. I know who led that discussion, a former former colleague whose bridal shower I attended. I can’t be sure (who can be?), but I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that she wanted me—a more senior staff member—gone because she saw me as a possible threat to her job. Well, she got wish: I was laid off and she’s since gotten two promotions. Funny thing, though, I never challenged her position and always went out of my way to do what was asked of me. Lot of good that did me!

Just keep in mind that when rumors of layoffs start swirling about an office (as they always do), it becomes like the Titanic or The Hunger Games. Everyone starts scrambling to save themselves and they don’t care who they have to trample to get to that lifeboat of a steady paycheck.

The employment market is improving. Oh……HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Really, does anyone believe that crap? I noticed soon after some articles came out about how the job market was improving and the unemployment rate had dropped to 6.6 percent (!?), economists and other experts pointed out it was a mirage, that the many long-term unemployed have given up looking for work or were not counted in the rolls of employable workers, and companies are not hiring in any great numbers.

The most pernicious aspect of those falsely encouraging stats is that it gives some stupid politician the ammunition they need not to extend unemployment benefits to the millions who have exhausted their much-needed funds after 26 weeks. I even heard one idiot congressman say that unemployment benefits should be “means tested.” For instance, if one person in a household makes $90,000 a year and the other spouse is unemployed, the jobless partner shouldn’t receive benefits.

On the surface, that’s sounds plausible. But what if that household depends on two paychecks? What if they have a family to support and a mortgage? Not to mention that unemployed workers are entitled to those benefits on a temporarily basis. It’s never that simple.

To my mind, “means testing” are just code words for, “We don’t want to give any tax dollars of our hard-earned money to lazy bums.”

I wish there were a way to make the process of being laid off fairer and more humane. But as long as the system stays as is, I doubt it will ever change.