[jolux]

I mean yeah but at this point you are basically admitting that keeping the company alive is more important to you than treating your employees equitably. Entirely possible for others to disagree with that stance, though your position does make sense if you take it.

[mostlyghostly]

Eh, you're not getting just how deep in the shit we were.

Sometimes you can't give everyone a pony.

There simply wasn't any money. That's the essence of running in financial distress. No banks, no loans, insurance support payments got swiped by other people we owed money to... You're running on the cash in the till.

We started with 500 jobs, most of which were union gigs with benefits. About 50 were still with us a week later, when this brutal end game went into full effect.

The cost of failure for this nasty little endgame for the 50 survivors, the quest for a sustainable business? We were an older union workforce, operating in an area with young non-union shops with sketchy labor policies. Our local employees were getting offers for $12 / hour with no benefits. Or a 40%+ drop in compensation for office staff due to age discrimination.

That's the difference between retiring for a nice middle class lifestyle and eating cat food for your golden years. Fifty lives fucked up, for loyal company soldiers.

So yeah, I wanted to keep the company alive to save jobs.

I'm a high end mercenary; I had an offer within a week of formally rolling off the program and plenty of consulting work to tide me over. My only prize here was moral satisfaction.

[kelnos]

I think part of the question is: why try so hard to save the company at all? If 90% of the people working there ends up out on the street anyway, what's so special about the company itself that warrants showering money on the remaining 10% to try to keep it afloat? Why not let it fail, and those 50 people -- if they really are so high-performing -- will quickly find jobs with other firms. Some of them might even opt to start a new business instead of finding a new gig, taking with them knowledge and potential customers.

Instead of using the last of the money to keep the 10% around on a hail-mary, spread that money around to 100% of the company so their crash landing is a little softer.

[mostlyghostly]

A good question. Here's an attempt at a reply..

- You're trying to retain 5, not the 50.. the other 45 are objectively not-critical to the enterprise (in the sense we could eliminate or replace those roles).

- A large fraction of the 45 are basically screwed in the job market; most of them were older, had decades of very specific experience, or had worked their way up in an organization that valued effort/loyalty over credentials. Milking another decade of work in their current role has life changing consequences for these workers and their families. Many of them were primary breadwinners in a bad area, so their job was the last line of defense between a respectable lower-middle class existence and the trailer park for them and their kids.

- Current reality was not reflective of long run potential. If we could stabilize the business, not only would the 50 jobs in question be preserved but there was an opportunity to rebuild and hire back. (feel good moment: this actually occurred. The team was able to restart key areas of the facility and we rehired some manufacturing people)

Young, highly educated people have no concept of the degree of privilege they enjoy in the labor markets. That degree opens doors and you don't get tossed out the instant some hiring manager sees a little grey hair. You don't have 30 years of experience which immediately becomes the leading reason NOT to hire you for a job because someone thinks you're incapable of learning anything new.

Life basically sucks past 50...

[jolux]

>Sometimes you can't give everyone a pony.

I'm not suggesting you can, I'm suggesting it's bad to give some people the boot and others a pony in the hope of saving an abstraction. The company doesn't exist outside of the people whose livelihoods it sustains.

[mostlyghostly]

Not everyone is equal in that analysis.

And in a financially constrained endgame, you have to make choices about who to keep and cut.

Cutting that senior sales executive will cost 20 other jobs due to lost business and downstream implications.

Cutting the factory worker costs zero other jobs.

The harsh reality is not everyone matters equally.

[and to be clear, I'm not talking about bullshit deals just because someone was "loyal" to the CEO. This is real talk, people who actually can deliver a path to group survival]

[jolux]

All I'm saying is that it's bad if you cut those people and use it to give your execs a golden parachute instead of more runway for the people left over.

[mostlyghostly]

In that event, most of the people in question will accept an offer from a competitor with greater assurances of financial security and return to loot and pillage what's left of the business on behalf of their new sponsors.

If you're lucky, they merely poach the stuff you cannot defend anymore. In most situations, they come after the crown jewels of the business, accounts which create the lions share of the revenue and profits which funds the business.

And then you're screwed. Shut it down, pink slips for everyone...

[jolux]

Well, that makes them assholes. I'm not in favor of giving bonuses to unethical assholes.

[ajzinsbwbs]

I don’t understand what you are proposing as an alternative. If the company dies who is going to take care of the employees? Lay off everyone because it would be wrong to only save some? If everyone makes that noble choice all we get to show for it is a depression.

[jolux]

If you can't keep everyone on in the first place it's pretty ugly to give the people at the top bonuses, they have less to lose from losing their job in the first place.

[mostlyghostly]

I'm keenly aware of the disparity. However...

- If we do not keep the highly paid senior sales rep, we're going to have no customers and thus... everyone gets canned. - They are objectively better off leaving for another firm, where they don't need to worry about impending doom. So we need to provide an appropriate incentive to prevent them from breaking ranks and screwing everyone else left behind. - The humble factory worker or customer service person doesn't have that same kind of impact on the whole....

Any moral conversation ultimately becomes a discussion about why someone with objectively better and safer options should continue to work for a company that is paying them less than market. Unless everyone else is willing to work for reduced salary / benefits and promise not to quit, that's not a morally tenable position....

Personally, I'd love it if people acted for the greater good. That's not going to happen here, unless you want to restrict people from changing employers and force them to show up to work...

[jolux]

I guess the real answer here is I'm not cut out to be an exec and I don't understand the mindset of people who are because I'm fine getting payed $100k a year (modulo inflation) for the rest of my life and I've lived most of my career at $30k, and I would never fire anyone to increase my own salary. I would sooner go broke at a company I ran than hang people out to dry who depended on me for a livelihood.

[kortilla]

> and I would never fire anyone to increase my own salary

How about this instead? Your company is overstaffed due to a massive drop in sales. You will run out of money and will have to fire everyone including yourself in one month. Your other choice is to cut 80% of the staff immediately and your business will make enough to pay everyone’s salary who remains.

The better choice for everyone is the surviving business, and that’s the one that puts more money in your pocket. Letting people go is a business decision and it’s very often the correct one. Good business decisions lead to making more money.

[kelnos]

That's not what we're talking about, though. If you suddenly don't have the market you used to, then it makes sense to cut down your workforce to be the appropriate size for the market you do have.

But that doesn't mean it's ethical to then throw money at your executives just to keep them around. If the business is viable with the smaller market and smaller workforce, then the executives should either stick around based on the company's future prospects, or leave. If they want to leave, then perhaps executives of their caliber aren't required to run the company given its new reality. Getting them to stick around by showering them with more money just increases wage inequality.

[selimthegrim]

Never be a starting assistant professor then.

[jolux]

What does that have to do with any of this?

[cinquemb]

And they also have less incentive to stay because these are supposedly people who could provide the same work for other companies in similar situations at the same or higher prices. I find myself in this situation right now: ill stay on at higher prices if the company wants to renew its contract, or i'll leave for another place (I have more people emailing me for work than I have before the pandemic and I'm not on any social media and don't have a personal website).

In an environment where businesses have been operating on massive leverage for years, there's a fight brewing over who is going to get cash-flows and who will not, this obviously extends to workers who have outsized impact on whether any given business will stay open or file chapter 7/11.

[jolux]

If I'm at a place where people will lose their jobs if I leave the company the answer is simple: I don't leave until that's either not the case or I personally can't afford it anymore.

[cinquemb]

I owe no loyalties to corporates, I have other interests that I would like to spend time on and pursue more than convincing stakeholders to make decisions that should have been made long ago to have them avoided being put in the position they are now.

If people insist on making choices that will continue to sink the ship, I don't have to go down with it.

[jolux]

>If people insist on making choices that will continue to sink the ship, I don't have to go down with it.

I think this calculus flips around when your commitment has entered a stage where other peoples' livelihoods depend on it, basically. That's all. Get out before it springs a leak in an org like that, is my advice.

[scarface74]

I owe no loyalties to any company.

I actually liked the company I just left. I liked the people and thought that the people in management up to and including management were all good people. I am usually far more cynical.

Post Covid, they decided to give everyone a pay cut instead of laying off people. This was morally the right thing to do in my opinion. It is a small company and I didn’t feel we had any dead weight.

I knew that in my position, the company would struggle a little bit. But what was I suppose to do? Stay out of loyalty or accept an offer that was a 60% increase in total comp at a more stable company?

[kelnos]

Take care of who? From the parent's tale, it sounds like 90% of the company got laid off anyway. They didn't get taken care of. Even if they did get some kind of severance package, they could have gotten more if the executives weren't paid retention bonuses and the company was just allowed to fail.

The bottom line is that most of the people who got hurt by a company's decline get zero say in how things go during that period, and obviously the people with the power are going to try to save the thing that signs their paychecks, even at the expense of the replaceable workers.