Originally posted by Mini D
So.. to wrap up with you arlo... I'm not bragging about my company or my position. I'm saying in an area where things were pretty easy for folk and work was anything but difficult... in an area where anyone could stay as long as they liked... we saw the turn over rate go from 3% to 30%. That's without any cutbacks. That's without brutal policies being levied. It's just that the workforce decided the time for jumping ship was ripe.
MiniD
Sounds pretty much regional, and I'm sorry to hear it.
Here, my generation was almost universally endowed with the work ethics of our fathers. We were taught to seek out the work we either enjoyed or was good at and barring that, to learn to enjoy or get good at the work we eventually ended up doing.
Those who were fortunate enough to go to college and receive a degree (and that wasn't exactly uncommon) were expected to excel, of course. But even those who went from high school into the workforce and starting a family of their own (which was MUCH more common) were taught that if you "made a good hand" that the company you worked for would appreciate you and you could stick with them and have a good life and eventually retire and go fishin'.
Someone forgot to tell the company execs that. I've seen my fair share of workers with ten to fifteen years service (in some instances more ... up to even less than a year from retirement) "downsized" from the workforce and having to start over again, often in a completely unrelated field where their years of experience meant nothing.
So it looks as if neither of us can claim a universal exact as to the nature of the relationship of the corporation and the worker in America.
Let me add that the term "union" has never been well received in this neck of the woods. Local business owners resisted them for obvious reasons and made sure that employees knew that the "way up THEIR ladder" (any chance of eventually becoming middle management .. which is the highest you could expect to go without a degree) would require the type of loyalty that didn't hold with such things. That being the case, the only union members locally are tradesmen or some of the few companies that migrated here whose corporate HQs were formed in an area where unionized labor already existed. Many of those "outsider" companies no longer exist here.
I've been a "company man." I've had friends who were "company men." We went to work and no matter our position on the ladder we gave it our best, we worked as professionals even if we weren't considered "professional status."
We are now in our forties and the "nineteen fifties" work ethics our fathers passed onto us ended up making us sheep for the slaughter in a world of cutthroat business practices.
Somewhere along the line a generation of executives decided we were expendable. Unless one managed to get into the "GOB" (good old boy) network and played company politics with the right people, it just didn't matter anymore how good you were at your job. Even then, there was no guarantee that the good `ol boys themselves wouldn't get downsized if the company had an out of town network of higher execs that had their own GOB network ... but at least some of them had golden parachutes.
Do I sound bitter? Damned straight. Do I feel betrayed? You betcha. So forgive me if I don't accept your version of "how good corporate America is versus the selfish and lazy American workforce" as a universal.
If, somehow, your region managed to avoid all of this and company ethics, by and large, still values it's workforce, that's great. I bear no animosity toward you for that. I just wanted you to get a different perspective from someone who HAS worked for a long time to achieve what you have and has obviously met more disappointment in that regards than you (or your father) has.
And as for the point of the thread: your local economy may be teh watermelon but that don't fertilize the flowers over here.
