The day I was laid off from my first job was valuable insofar as it taught me how little value company loyalty holds in today's economy. I had been working at the company for two and a half years already, and I felt quite a fierce loyalty. I liked the work, I liked the people. I felt that I had established a number of good friendships with several of my co-workers
Prior to the layoff speculation had already begun about the financial state of the company. We were not in big trouble, but it was becoming clear that we were not going to make much profit over the course of a couple of months. The rumor mill naturally turned this information into a bloated monstrosity of fear, but being young and enthusiastic I pretty much ignored it. Certainly the "it can't happen to me" mentality was at the forefront of my thinking. The layoff came on the first Monday of a new month. My boss came into the lab around noon and asked me in somber tones to attend a meeting at 3 o'clock. As soon as he had made the pronouncement and left, I felt instinctively what was about to happen.
I do not know what the average reaction, if there is such a thing, is to finding out you are about to be laid off. My reaction was that I did not want to leave my co-workers in the lurch and that I should try to wrap up all the work I had for the day. I skipped lunch and worked straight through until 3 to make sure that I had left no loose ends.
The meeting took place in the upstairs boardroom. Again, I did not actually know what was happening other than as an instinct. I walked in to find approximately 30 others in the room, all looking gloomy. Some had clearly already been through the process at least once before and looked resigned. The CEO came in, gave us the grim news, and proceeded to go into the details of what we should be doing now that we were no longer gainfully employed.
I was in shock. I had been completely blindsided by the layoff. But looking back at it, what upset me the most was what happened after the meeting ended. Apparently, while we were being canned, around 30 of our coworkers who still had jobs were summoned upstairs to wait outside the room. One employee per one former employee. Each one was assigned to someone specific, as if this sort of personal touch would make the whole business any easier. Once we were paired with our wardens, we were given 5 or 10 minutes to collect all personal belongings and leave the building.
The look on my coworker's and, dare I say, friend's face while I collected the very few personal items at my desk is with me to this day. He looked miserable. He looked hurt. He looked as if he had been ordered to walk me to the gallows instead of outside into a brisk February day. He looked as if there was no possibility that we would ever be able to communicate again.
In a way, the last is true. As soon as you leave a job, you almost certainly lose contact with all those people you spent so much of your time with. What little contact is still maintained is hard to call a friendship. It is an acquaintance, a polite how do you do every once in a while. This has been sadly true for both of my previous two jobs.
So what was the moral? The takeaway for me was that loyalty to your place of employment is rewarded with absolutely nothing. If you are not profitable, you will be cut adrift as easily as if you were a piece of junk being thrown in the trash. And your profitability means your subservience. If you work the allotted 40 hours a week and get your job done, you are not good enough. If you do not enslave all your waking time, your entire existence to being a cog in a machine, you are not good enough. If you do not devote your days off, your sleeping time, your vacation time to being available for work, you are not good enough. If you do not permit yourself to be turned into a robot, you are not good enough. Welcome to corporate America.
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