Worker Describes Losing Her Job After 26 Years, Wants More Dignity For "Terminated" Workers

http://www.laborradio.org/node/13911

By Doug Cunningham

Millions of American workers have felt what she felt. Vita Maggio was fired from her job in an economic downsizing after 26 years at the same company – her job and her a life a victim of the economic crisis that still hold millions in its grip.

: “First I was overwhelmed and feeling very sad and annoyed and angry – and truly unappreciated. I mean, I kept on thinking wow this is , what a way to end my career of 26 plus years. Rainy day and it sort of like matched the sadness of the whole situation. It was surreal, I mean I just couldn’t gras that this was actually happening.”

Maggio said she was escorted out of the building with her personal belongings after a brief, awkward and tense meeting with a human resources woman she didn’t know and her boss of many years. Maggio says workers should be treated with more respect and dignity if and when the time comes when companies end their employment.

: “I think that senior management needs to re-examine their company’s core values. You know, basically are employees going to be treated with trust and loyalty and where do those two values- where are they placed in the listing of the company’s vision or their values set. I think they have to analyze how their companies handle downsizing. In my opinion there cant be a cookie cutter protocol for all layoff situations.”

a mandatory 2-week notice of firing, in down-sizing situations. That is, give workers you are firing for non-disciplinary reasons the same courtesy that's expected of workers who are quitting.

would have to be insane to do so. That's giving a newly-disgruntled worker two weeks to infect computers with viruses and to commit whatever other damage he / she can think of. Making it mandatory would force a company to create unpleasant loopholes, such as giving the worker shit duty for the last two weeks away from anything sensitive.

I guess I just can't imagine myself being that bitter, but I've also never worked somewhere for 20-odd years.

And the shit duty is a good point... I know people who have generously given 2-week notices at shitty retail jobs, and are repaid by their supervisor cutting their hours in half.

So every employee that is laid off is one step from going postal. Come on most employees realize that it is a business decision and aren't going to go around trying to destroy the business especially if they are treated respectfully when it comes to the process of laying them off. This is a current of thought in the business community that I don't really understand and that is to say that all employees will rip you off or screw up 'your company' if given a chance. All members of the labor pool are really lazy, no good losers that would rather sit at home and get unemployment checks or better yet welfare checks. Come on and try to be a little human and realize these are people just like you trying to make a living, pay their bills, raise families in short trying to have a reasonably nice life. By treating them as just another cost of doing business and dehumanizing them (I know it makes it easier to lay them off if you don't really see them as people) you aren't doing yourself, your business or them any favors.

that is laid off is one step from going postal. But if you let employees hang around for two weeks after they've been told that they are going to be laid off you are likely to have that one employee who is. That one employee could potentially do irreparable harm to the company. Better to be on the safe side.

Due to the potential that 'some' employee at 'some' time might not like being let go all other terminated employees should be treated like crap? I think businesses should have a little more faith in human nature. There may be positions like in IT where you might want to pull back an employees access and obviously keeping an eye out for erratic behavior is a good idea. Treating all employees badly because of the 'potential' of there being a bad apple just makes no sense to me.

Corporations don't think of it as "treating employees badly." They think of it as "eliminating positions" or "reducing overhead" or "right-sizing." The employees are meaningless collateral damage and, in most cases, companies strive to protect the bottom line against any potential threat to it, even if that threat is 62-year-old Martha possibly stealing a pack of napkins from the kitchenette.

By what possible justification would a large company choose to "have a little more faith in human nature?" What possible benefit could companies derive from it? They're terminating employees who likely won't be allowed on the premises thereafter, so there's absolutely no reason (in the company's mind) to extend any courtesy whatsoever.

The company where I used to work does it like this: the employee to be terminated is called into the manager's office for a brief chat, during which time the employee's passwords are all deleted and her phone disconnected. The employee is then escorted to HR, where she gets a brief overview of COBRA. The employee can ask the manager to retrieve a few personal belongings from her desk/cube/office, such as coats, purses, or the like. All other items in the desk are packaged up and shipped to the terminated employee's address.

Then the employee is escorted from the building.


I suspect that this model is not uncommon in the business world. I don't see how you might convince a large company to "have a little more faith" in its terminated employees, when the very first thing they do is make sure that the employee can't even access the phone or computer.

Not all, just "most."

By the way, since I'm not a business owner laying people off (hell, I'm not even employed anymore), spare me your "Come on and try to be a little human..." diatribe. I already said that in a perfect work I'd like to see notice too (I certainly didn't get any when I was canned). I'm on the receiving end of shitty treatment here, and not once did I say I like seeing people canned with no notice.

As for your "All members of the labor pool are really lazy, no good losers that would rather sit at home and get unemployment checks," I don't even know where to start. How the fuck could you have possibly gotten anything out of what I wrote to warrant such stupid, knee-jerk sarcasm?

I think I left some stuff out of the 'labor pool' comment it was intended to express the idea that corporations (not you in particular) don't see labor as people and to back up that attitude they (and this is not just corporations but politicians and others as well) denigrate the people as being lazy. I still have a problem with the idea that because of some 'potential' problem employee (wonder if there has been studies done on problems with workers that have been given notice doing damage to the companies they are leaving) that companies have to pull the 'can em and walk em out the front door trick'. Actually the company I was laid off from after 15+ years gave me a couple of months prior notice and I was an IT person involved in archiving their legacy data (and keeping the old system running) in preparation for them to move to a new system. Another question would be is the 'perp walk' just done to lower level members of the labor force or do CEO's and high officers of the company get the same treatment? I would guess the higher ups get much nicer treatment.

Your post struck me as being aimed at me and I was in a bit of shock there. Now that I know that it wasn't, I certainly agree with you 100%.

Some of them make you train your cheaper replacement first.

My workplace gave laid off workers two week notice with a severance package based on their tenure. Weeks before the layoffs they had a "voluntary layoff" where an even more generous severance package was offered to people who chose to get laid off.

If you worked the two extra weeks (preparing/transferring work to other people and shelving projects) you got a generous severance. If you were an ass about it, disruptive, or malicious you were "fired on the spot", escorted out, and received no severance package. Not only that... but keep in mind that unemployment may be denied to people who are fired for misconduct.

This is a company with highly sensitive/secret materials too.

Three employees did their best to fuck the company on the way out. I wasn't one of them, but I'll admit I gave it a fleeting thought.

The employer would simply assume that the soon-to-be-ousted employee will spend those two weeks stealing, disrupting, and generally fucking thins up for the company.

I agree with the above post that this won't be true of every employee or even most employees, but employers would assume it to be the case regardless.

And, honestly, it seems likely that the terminated employee would at the very least start pilfering copier paper and the like, as a sort of "pound of flesh."

drop productivity to the point where you might as well have fired them right then anyway. Yeah, you're probably right.

they fired about half the engineers in the department where I worked. On a Friday. One week before Christmas. Literally met them at the doors as they were leaving work and handed them a pink slip. Told them they could come in the following day (Saturday) between 8-12 and clear out their desks. Some of them had worked for the company for decades.

It certainly let the rest of know exactly where we stood on the food chain.

started escorting laid-off/fired workers out the door within 30 minutes or so of the termination order. It seems to me that it started in the 80's, but I'm not entirely positive.

The first time I heard about it I was bothered by the underlying assumption: that the newly laid-off worker cannot be trusted not to sabotage the company or workplace in some way. It's just the most egregious example of how management invariably thinks the worst about their workers. And then complain because those mistrusted workers aren't more "loyal". Meanwhile, upper management can fuck-up big time, drive the company into bankruptcy, or cause serious and major economic crises and they are rewarded with enormous bonuses and "golden parachutes".

We seriously need a new labor movement in this country. We seriously need average workers to feel a sense of solidarity with each other, rather than a mutual distrust. We need The Nightly Labor Report as well as the Nightly Business Report. We need to have a section of the newspaper devoted to labor news, as well as the section devoted to business news. We need a widely disseminated and read Labor Journal, just as we have the Wall Street Journal.

In an early online training at a previous corporate job, I was told point-blank that employee loyalty was of minimal value to the company. Presumably, as long as the employee is sufficiently motivated by fear or necessity, he'll work just hard enough to keep from getting fired until it's time to downsize him.

If it comes down to a big company choosing between "loyalty" and "slightly lower overhead," the latter will win every time.

This is one of the problems I had with management classes I took in school (Business Admin was my minor). Even in the lower level classes they start explaining that labor is just one of the costs of business. So when they talk about 'cutting costs' during bad times it is never put in human terms. It's not 'we have to cut Joe in accounting' it's 'we have to cut A POSITION in accounting' or 'we have to cut COSTS in accounting'. I also noticed that (at least in the company I worked for) that not only is management mixing with labor outside of work frowned on but that the managers were told to absolutely not do it. I suspect the idea being that if management members become friends with labor members it will be that much harder to lay off people because you will actually see them as people and not just positions or costs. Now that I have ranted about how I have problems with 'corporate' America in general I will say that not all companies have this attitude. It would be interesting to see a study done (there probably already are) of the success of companies that 'toe the bottomline' paradigm as opposed to those that actually show some loyalty to those that actually do the work and produce the products.

Admittedly, the company I mentioned had somewhere around 1,800 employees, so the situation could indeed be very different at a company with under 100 on payroll.

You're also absolutely right about labor being considered a "cost," and at that same job we were reminded of this inconvenience at least several times per month. Someone higher up would invariably lament the fact that payroll was the company's single biggest cost, followed closely by commission-payments to clients. Well, no shit! I suppose that if you could get away with not paying your workers and not making payments to contract clients, you'd have a lot more cash to give out in executive bonuses!

It's a shame that employees are so selfish, expecting to be paid for their work rather than simply enjoying the privilege of licking their employers' boots.