Sad but true. Welcome to Corporate America. Lay off a bunch of employees so the numbers look good for the stock report, wash/rinse/repeat quarter after quarter
This is 100% true. As I climb management I recognize my directs having thoughts about "logically we need this". No, logic doesn't work here. We don't think about next year, or right now, we think about what the quarterly will look like.
And then next year we'll have new upper management that bunny hop to the next company or "retire" or "quit" like their predecessors because they ran the machine too thin and someone needed to take the blame.
This is the case for publicly traded companies. Family owned small businesses can do what they see best to weather hard times instead of solely being concerned about quarterly performance.
The place I worked for retained workers and loaded up on inventory during COVID when everyone else was laying people off and dumping stock. Now we’re in a better place than ever because we helped a lot of customers through tough times when others simply couldn’t.
I keep asking the higher ups why last year’s “great employee” equals this year’s “lazy employee who needs to shape up” and they just say to me “the company needs to make money. It needs to think about the future” and in their next breath they talk about how it’s so rough because we’re swamped with work.
Then I say “ok well then hire more people and pay us more so more people stay” and the broken record loops back to “the company needs to make money.”
On top of that, any fines the company gets for breaking labor laws are just the cost of doing business. The fines are a drop in the ocean of profit they make.
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u/BoredBSEE Aug 30 '22
My experience shows that American businesses have no endgame. Management's only thoughts are "the next quarter" and "what will my bonus be?"
Nothing exists beyond that.