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Monday, September 01, 2008

Corporate America

I rarely talk about what I do for a living, because frankly it's not all that interesting. The most interesting thing about it, I suppose, is that I am able to support my family on a single income, which is increasingly rare these days. This is not because I make a lot of money, mind you; I make shit, to be honest. But we're good at managing what we have, and living within our means. I don't have a cell phone, and I finally just got a vehicle from this century only because my 17-year-old Accord was about to blow after 225K miles. The only indulgences are DirecTV and Netflix.

I work, as I have through most of my adult life when I wasn't playing music, in manufacturing. I like the idea of making something tangible that has intrinsic value. These days it's a desk job in logistics, with a huge component of interdepartmental communications, including between departments that hadn't traditionally gotten along. I'm fortunate in that I like what I do, I'm pretty good at it, and I like the people I work with. I've found that for many people, none of those things happen very often.

When I first started with my current company a few years ago, the facility was basically a medium-sized fish in a small pond. Things were busy, which is always better than the alternative. About a year ago, all the facilities from our company were snapped up by a much bigger corporation. They immediately sent envoys from corporate headquarters to talk up their great health plans, tuition reimbursement opportunities, internal talent development, blah blah blah. Nothing like a good handjob on company time. And counterintuitively, despite oil and commodity prices ramping up drastically, we became busier and busier. Job security.

A couple of smaller places were closed during the spring and summer, and their workloads moved to our facility, but they had been glorified FDCs (forward distribution centers) anyway. If you can schedule things properly, lower and more efficient shipping costs can easily offset commercial rental space in metropolitan areas. And much of the additional work we took on fell directly in my lap. Hence the 50-hour weeks as of late. Again, not a problem. The extra cash offset the gas price increases in my 80-minute round-trip commute, and I appreciated that they felt that I could handle the extra work.

So it was a rude awakening last week for us to be collectively called up and told that the plant is closing. This is what happens when competitors buy each other, folks, and it ain't pretty. The severance package is a joke, and the only silver lining is that the closing will take some time. Many places do not have that luxury, obviously, so it can't really be taken for granted. But the whole thing is being framed as a necessary business decision driven by tough economic times, never mind that the ginormous corporation has sufficient resources to ride the storm out.

But it ain't the first time, and it won't be the last, and many people have faced far worse circumstances. Most of us land on our feet, eventually. But a couple things about this stick in my craw.

One is the basic idea worth considering, on this holiday which celebrates the working stiff, that perhaps people work better, harder, and smarter when they don't feel like they constantly have to look over their shoulders. Should people have to worry that, even as they're being glad-handed with all sorts of temporary blandishments, they are mere months from being sold down the river so that someone's stock rises half a point?

I think not; I think a large measure of Americans' chronic unhappiness can be found in that, besides being fat and teevee-addled, they know they have no real job security. They're afraid to take vacations, because they're petrified that the company might figure out they can get along just fine without them. They're stressed because frequently they're clinging to a job they despise, with people they detest, simply because the market sucks and they know they're lucky just to have a shitty PPO plan. I was lucky; as I said, I liked the work and the people, and the health plan was pretty good. Many people have to take what they can get.

But the thing that really pissed me off was when it was time to go in to discuss severance policies and what-not. The woman who had been sent over from corporate was polite and professional enough, and launched immediately into the hortatory nonsense of this being the beginning of an "adventure". Look, lady, I'm 41 and I have a family to support; I got that adventure shit out of my system over a decade ago.

Plus I work 50 hours a week, commute another ten, and had been planning on going for an MBA. That seems like quite enough "adventure". It connotes a feeling that we had become sedentary and complacent in our sinecured positions, obviously an inherently offensive insinuation. By taking on extra work, trying to be a team player, I had simply been cutting my own throat all summer. She didn't have an answer for that. They never do.

But they have to do what they're told, and when their turn comes, and a stranger gets dispatched from afar to cut them off at the neck, I'm sure they'll understand. We've all become used to the dynamic, which may be the worst part about it.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Careful there -- you're sort-of implying that a corporation exists in order to serve the productive needs of its workers, instead of the workers existing merely in order to advance the profits of the corporation as an independent entity.

You communist! You terrorist!

Anonymous said...

Damn, dude. That's tough news. Good luck to all of ya--I'm already going through the same shit, more or less, right now.

Maybe the French have a point when they bitch about Anglo-Saxon capitalism.

Anonymous said...

Heywood,

I am real sorry to hear that. you always mentioned work, in passing, as something you mostly liked.

Now all you have is this shitty blog and you better not slack off here or it may fire you too! ;-)

but seriously good luck and keep us posted. I've been reading your ideas for a while now and have almost always agreed with you.

Anonymous said...

Hmm was Joe Blow's comment deleted?

Anonymous said...

oh bad Joe! blind as a bat!

Well Heywood at least you will have Srah Pain to ease your passing into the great unemployed

Anonymous said...

Sorry to hear about this, it truly sucks. All "Human Resources" departments are Satanic, anyway. In fact, the latest at my workplace is that they renamed themselved "Human Capital Management," thinking that since it has "management" in the title that they're important. All it really says is that they're not, you know, actual humans. Good luck to you.

Anonymous said...

Joe Blow's comments SHOULD be deleted, fuck him. Sorry about your situation. Thanks for the fantastic and often amusing writing that you do.

Anonymous said...

least I have a name anon....so FU2

and look up what ;-) means twit