Posted on 03/22/2019 10:29:09 AM PDT by Red Badger
Years ago the company I worked for bought a competitor. I figured all was well since we were the big company acquiring a much smaller one.
They didn’t tell us the plan was to adopt the (awful) corporate culture of the acquired company—until it was too late.
It's a cookbook!
Time Warner was “bought out” by AOL in the 1990s in a hostile takeover. Then, after the sale was official, AOL opened their books to reveal that much of that money was built on speculation of AOL’s future subscriber base and wasn’t real.
Lotsa pissed-off TW employees as the stock did a nosedive from over $100/share to under $10/share. Yes, indeed. Since TW had a generous stock purchase plan for employees, a lot of employees were heavily invested.
The AOL Board were quickly dispatched in a palace coup so the top dogs became TW people but the damage was done. Time Warner Cable was then split off from the rest of Time Warner because it was considered the most profitable asset so it could be sold to keep the other divisions afloat.
I remember that.......................
And AT&T just bought TW, so it all begins again
Layoffs usually happen on Saturdays so that you are assured of a pleasant weekend. (I wonder how many office shootings we shall hear about.)
Layoffs are murder. They are life-changers.
That is how the fascism worded it and what modern socialists believe.
[/l] <---- lib (speaking)
Having gone through a few, I have a template for mergers.
1. Evaluate where you sit. If you are in a fungible position (accounting, management, etc) get the resume polished up.
2. Evaluate your current location. If you are in a factory, and the combination of the merger means the supply will exceed the demand, call a head hunter today.
3. Look at the culture. If you don’t feel you will mesh with the new company, prepare an exit.
In other words, assume that you will be let go and prepare accordingly. Made it through three so far and left one before it got time to cut heads. Didn’t regret any of it.
Be a merc, not a company man. The company doesn’t care about you.
Good advice. Also works for corporate restructuring.
And then they proceeded to lose $13 billion dollars.
Suddenly the leftist herders do not like herding politics.
So you can watch your job get outsourced to India?
Nowadays they’ll just bring the Indians here...
Far too many people don’t look at the dynamics both inside their company and outside; they don’t look at how they help (personally) to contribute to the bottom line, and what might endanger their positions until it is too late.
I remember many years ago when that little book “Who Moved My Cheese” was circulating; it was designed to make employees look at the larger picture (especially in light of globalization, considering when it was released). People couldn’t assume their jobs would be safe just because they’d always worked those jobs; there were powerful forces at work to either move jobs overseas (as technology made this easier) or move foreigners here (as corruption made that easier). As a white guy I always warn others: Your knowledge is your best job security, and guard it closely; no reason to pass along decades of accumulated wisdom to someone sent to take your job (either a foreigner or affirmative action token). Many FReepers describe how Asians can be uncooperative coworkers; I suspect many of them are influenced by populations where dozens of educated people are lined up to replace you when you let down your guard.
The days of spending decades working in a job with skills that age quickly are over for most professions; you will either be “in school” (figuratively, if not literally) forever or your value quickly drops.
Gee... sorry about your luck! /s
The upside... there are at least one million plus UNFILLED jobs available and waiting in the economy at this point in time.
With bank mergers I suspect that lower salaries/less accumulated benefits were keys to keeping your job; it didn’t seem the most experienced people were kept on in cases of duplication, but instead younger, cheaper people were safe. A nightmare to deal with...
Occupy Wall Street, at its inception, held demonstrations (shown on the news) where laid-off Americans demonstrated in front of their former NYC employers while their foreign replacements entered the buildings in the background; in cases where foreigners were unavailable, it seemed financial institutions simply swapped staffs to reset salaries and accumulated vacation time. Scary stuff - and it plays no small role in our negative birthrate today. First they gave the jobs to the foreigners; now they sell the homes to them that Americans won’t risk buying.
Many of the baby boomers are hitting retirement age (just retired a few months ago myself) and leaving with a ton of knowledge about the inner workings of their organization.
I expect to see lots of “strange things” happen when the knowledge is lost.
Most senior managers (private or public sector) are amazingly clueless about how to make the trains run on time in their organization.
Details matter, and the worker bees that know those details really matter.
I’m watching that happen at my job (guys with decades of knowledge retiring), and honestly they’re replacing them 2-for-1 with either white women who are only slightly younger, or foreign women who are much younger - and neither pair comes close to the knowledge the retiring guy had - even combined. Another FReeper posted on a related thread a while ago about bank branch managers; our area (northeastern NJ) has been hit with a double whammy of retirements coupled with the flight of many Americans from this area, so people who barely qualified as admin assistants are being dressed up as managers. Most of the bank staff in my area are foreigners and female; the manager is just the oldest one.
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