I've seen it with me and now two of my sons.
With me at 35 years and several others at 25-30 years, treated us like crap
and babied the young guys, we would have twice the workload and turnover rate was still
100 percent. I told the HR lady to F**ck off and retired at 61.
Over 40 years I've dealt with every manufacturer in this area and it's all the same.
Your Damn lucky to have a job that shows the same loyalty to you as you have shown to them.

I blame greed

Management assumes that the older workers will just “take it” and do what is dumped on them and they will for various reasons. Fear of being shown the door, not being able to find work, loss of income and health insurance are all valid reasons in the older workers mind.

While the young new fresh faces get to do their own thing and encouraged by a management team with similar attributes they are allowed free reign. And when something goes sideways who do they come to for a bailout?

I’ve got a couple stories from my last month and a half before I retired but for brevity the last six months my supervisor played the “we will go on without you just fine”but it was entertaining how many “we need you to get involved” instances came up. And how I said “You better figure it out yourself” to each of those.

Age discrimination is real, maybe not overt but it’s still there. And middle and lower management personnel fall in line many times because they fear job loss themselves especially if they are older.

I have to agree, the larger they become the more the individuals are looked upon as chattel. I saw that a lot in my last few years with the rise in corporate ownership of automotive and powersports stores.

I wouldn't say it is a size of company that is the problem.
Unfortunately it is sadly just business.

Many of us don't understand the lack of support for loyalty to a company.
I know that "loyalty" to a company held me back in my early days of working for the man.
I stayed at a company too long that did not offer the opportunities to do much better.
Don't get me wrong, I loved the company, people and the work ~ it was just capping me financially.
I left and almost immediately doubled my income.
However, laying off a long time employee can be difficult for both employer and employee but sometimes have to be done for the good of the business.

I completely understand the feeling.

It is why became self-employed many years ago.

^^^ Yes!

I always thought it meant a lot to be employee BS2660 where I worked, until they were bought out.

Okay, not really...

They'll also look for cause to fire you when you get close to retirement age. I had to fight Civil Service for 3 years to retain my pension because the "CEO" of my institution was getting bonuses for screwing long term employees out of retirement.

I consider myself “Damn lucky”. I work for the giant in this industry and as I’ve aged here I’ve been treated increasingly better.

Strangely enough you are coddled early, in your prime years they are not afraid to treat you like a rented mule. Somewhere around 20 years your service is really recognized. They don’t look at age or job related injuries as a means to get you out the door.

Management at my employer needs to be reduced. When an organization gets too top heavy, nothing good comes from it for us peasants.

I learned early on that loyalty was an extinct concept in corporate America.

I was at a large tech company for almost 15 years, but moved to a smaller software company when I saw a good opportunity. My Mom scolded me for not being loyal to my former employer.

I told her that they got 100% loyalty from me for the years I was there. But if the word came down to reduce headcount, they wouldn’t hesitate to send me packing. A year or two after I left, they did just that and terminated thousands in a couple of rounds of job cuts.

^^^ No one ever gives you notice that they are going to fire you.

As long as I work for somebody, I "ride for the brand," so to speak, but if I don't like things I quit. Depending on my relationship with the employer, I have given anywhere from 2 weeks notice (if they were nice to me) to none at all (if they were dicks).

if you look at many big companies, they have 2 parts or depts, that are there to both help, and hurt you

AP (asset protection, mostly worthless suckasses) and HR,

as in you are human, and are our resource

neither really cares if you exist or not, you quit, they hire someone else, you mess up, they document and take notes,


when I was in retail store management, both were much more of a hindrance to getting the jobs done, effectively and on time,

and each manages to find a way to increase thier size, without any contribution to the bottom line,

AP (also known as Loss prevention) will run you some numbers about how much they saved the company in shrink numbers, thru finding paperwork errors or catching a kid stealing,

one told me he caught a teenager stealing a pack of gum, at 79 cents, and how if he had not caught him, he, the thief, could have cost the company thousands in the future if he had been allowed to keep stealing,

truth is, the time that guy spent fucking off on the clock was way more costly than any kid stealing future bubble gum

I drove semi's for 35 years with zero accidents. Has to be a big cost savings.
Not even a pat on the back. I think the plant manager was more pissed because
I got 5 weeks vacation, he didn't.

Add Safety as a department not there to help you. Actually, there are no departments to help you

quote:

Originally posted by egregore:
^^^ No one ever gives you notice that they are going to fire you.

As long as I work for somebody, I "ride for the brand," so to speak, but if I don't like things I quit. Depending on my relationship with the employer, I have given anywhere from 2 weeks notice (if they were nice to me) to none at all (if they were dicks).

Yes, I ran into that once. Dealership I was at sucked and that was a polite way of saying it. We were a Union shop, they were no help hence my distaste for those too. While I was negotiations with two other dealerships a third one came a knocking. Interviewed on a Monday night, I had to start the following Monday.

I always believed in two weeks notice so I went in on Tuesday and notified my manager. He had only been there about a month, dealer fired the previous one. Glenn wasn’t happy as he was trying to keep everyone of us as there was a lot of dissent in the department.

So he was trying to play Mr.Badass with “The Union contract says you HAVE to give me two weeks notice, he already knew of the grievance we four countermen filed and the Union’s response. I looked at him and replied “So, if you fire me are you going to give me two weeks prior notice?”

He looked at me,started laughing and said “Good point.” I left that Friday.

quote:

Originally posted by shovelhead:
I always believed in two weeks notice so I went in on Tuesday and notified my manager.

In my case, I’d been with my employer 7 or 8 years. It was a great place to work for around 5 years. Then there was a boardroom “coup”. The Board Chairman engineered the CEO’s ouster and installed one of his flunkies in his place. That guy changed the whole company culture for the worse.

My new boss was an unqualified but politically connected jackass. It didn’t take long before I was frozen out of any meaningful work; I just sat in my office most days twiddling my thumbs.

When I bailed, I gave him 10 days notice instead of 2 weeks. It didn’t matter because I wasn’t doing much except sit in my office all day reading books on my Kindle or streaming Netflix on my phone. But that didn’t stop my boss from telling anyone who’d listen how “unprofessional” I was for not giving him 2 weeks notice.

Car dealers are one of the greediest bunches around, large or small, the one common denominator. Last time I managed (went back to the counter for the next 29 years) had a reputation that was lower than whale feces and he vowed to clean up his act.

He hired a top notch service manager and recruited me from a dealer that was up for sale.
I went there, between the service manager and myself we turned parts and service around in eighteen months and kept going higher. Well until a National Auto Dealers Association meeting and their introduction of Twenty Groups. Those are groups of twenty dealers similarly sized, similar markets, population. They network how to improve their businesses aka how to screw their employees and customers more effectively.

Service manager and myself received a one third pay cut after one of those sessions. And,the dealer couldn’t understand why I didn’t give the new plan a fair chance. He got thirty days notice and still screwed me out of my last commission check.

Uh, Mr. Dealer, maybe I have to support my family without dumpster diving for groceries……

A comment made about the size of management made earlier struck a nerve with me. I worked at GM (hourly-UAW) for almost 43 years with the last 22 at the Tech Center in Warren MI.
As I worked in several of the different buildings there I was amazed at the amount of salaried employees there. And knowing that there was even more in downtown Detroit and other places was staggering. Granted, not all were in management but I just could not imagine what all of them could be doing.

It always amazed me how employers would try to make you feel guilty for leaving or just get downright nasty to you.

Case in point, the one third pay cut job. Though the service director/manager had started cleaning up the mess I came in to refine and manage the department and build it up. Which I did over the next almost three years. Six days a week about 60+ hours on-site plus delivering parts to repair shops in my town fifty miles away as there was no GM dealer there after the one I previously worked at closed.

Several of the shops I had keys to along with their alarm codes, I’d drop their parts, pick up payments and leave. On the average once I got to town I’d be delivering parts for another hour or so, sometimes to another town to the west that was thirty miles away. Combine with paperwork is take and do at home at night, add another hour or so on the average.

So my last day, I had all my invoices referenced to accounts (inventory, discounts, shop supplies, credits) and all packing slips filed and cross checked to the GM factory invoices that arrived on Fridays which was my last day. As my policy, department swept, all parts put away, warranty tagged and put in warranty bins, trash emptied, literally nothing to be done on Monday morning but put the key in the lock to open.

Went to turn my keys in, dealer gone, son I normally had contact with also gone. Other son was there, he and I were not on good terms. He used to come in on weekends and take parts for his or his buddies cars, trucks, boats and just throw the parts that wouldn’t work on the floor and leave empty boxes scattered around. The major SHTF between he and I was when he took a high end Delco radio and didn’t leave a note or say anything, several hundred dollars in 1986 money.

So I took my keys in as he was still in his office. Thanked him and his family for the opportunity I had there and wished them luck, not sarcastically as I wished to leave on good terms.
His reply “You’ll be back here in six months begging for your job back, maybe I’ll make you a Porter”

At that point I tossed my keys across his desk and onto the floor while saying “Don’t count on it!”

Working for any large corporation shows us what is wrong with human nature. The larger the organization, the better they treat low-lifes and the worse they treat honorable people.

I sat in monthly Sales and Operations meetings as part of the corporate support staff between the corporate VP and the area presidents.

The priority was making the top line sales number for the quarter. If that wasn't going to be made, then, the margin target has to be made by cutting costs. Sine the areas were pretty much selling organizations, cutting costs meant laying off people.

To a "well-run" business, people are just numbers to help make the top line sales number or the bottom line margin to be added or subtracted as necessary.

Now that I have stock in the company given to me as part of my compensation, I can appreciate that they work to keep the dividends and growth reliable. But it's a hell of a way to be treated as a number in the ledger.