On Working #1

I used to work for a large company. Last year a fair percentage of the workforce were laid off. This was not the first group within the company to be laid off, nor, I am sure will they be the last. But it got me wondering why they were laid off. Was it because they were no longer needed? No I don’t think so. On the contrary, the people who were let go seemed, to me, to be the people who actually made the products we were selling. OK, I thought, was it because we made a loss as a company? Nope, we made a profit, A very, very large (some might say obscenely large) profit. OK, so maybe these people were bad at their job? Once again the answer appeared to be no. Talking to them at the trendy coffee bar the company installed they all seemed to be way above average performers. OK, I thought, what the hell is going on? We had, as a company, seen our profits (not just our turnover) grow on a yearly basis. Yep, you read it right: Every year we made more money than the year before but we were getting rid of the people responsible for that growth. So, the company seemed, to me, to be getting rid of the ability to make money. This seemed crazy! I was sure there was a rational reason behind the move. Boy was I mistaken! After a lot of digging, annoying my line managers and their line managers and so on up the company food chain I found out that the underlying reason was that the company didn’t increase their profits over the previous year by as much as it had promised. It didn’t miss by much but it did miss. And so, in order to appease some anonymous shareholders that no-one had ever seen, someone had to go. And was it the people who had made the absurd profit promise in the first place? I don’t think so. It was the people who had actually created the very large profit we had made. Now that is certifiable lunacy! And that is why I used to work for that company.