Posted on December 23, 2007 - by Venik

Corporate logic

As you are doing your holiday shopping, here is a good reason to avoid Circuit City: according to a Washington Post article, Circuit City execs had the bright idea to lay off the more experienced salespeople, who are earning $14-15/hr and replace them with entry-level sales personnel for $9/hr. Circuit City stocks took a nosedive and lost 75% of value. Circuit City execs got $1-million retention bonuses. Then Circuit City decided to rehire some of the laid off staff, but offered them only $9/hr and none of the benefits for years served. Brilliant.

This reminded me of something that happened years ago at work. In the summer of 2003, HR management of a large US aerospace company sent out an internal email to various HR bosses and departmental heads detailing the upcoming layoffs. It could be inferred from the email that people who fully utilize their benefits (high medical expenses, high percentage of sick days used, etc) were to lead the first wave of layoffs. It is illegal, of course, to target employees for layoffs because they use their benefits.

Whether this was the actual policy or just the email was awkwardly worded we will never know: this matter was suppressed years ago. But not without a great fireworks display, though. The genius who sent out the email, accidentally sent it to the wrong distribution list: instead of going to a select group of trusted managers, the email ended up in the email boxes of several hundred engineers and IT folks.

I remember some high-level HR boss – his face tomato-red – yelling and screaming at our Exchange sysadmins to delete the message from the email servers. The message was deleted. The problem, however, was that most engineers and IT personnel have their email forwarded to their Unix email accounts. Out of all Unix sysadmins I was the only one on duty that day and the avalanche of managers came down on my head as I was getting ready to stuff my face with a Wawa sub.

Being an outside contractor (outsourced less than a month earlier), I calmly advised the various angry senior managers to submit a service request via the Help Desk and I assured them that I will get right on it in the next few days, in accordance with our SLAs. You can imagine the reaction. Regardless, without a service request and approved change control form my hands were tied. Not technically, but procedurally, of course, and that day, for some reason, I felt like being very procedural.

There were no consequences to me. Three HR people got canned (that I know of). Exchange sysadmin got a slap on the wrist for deleting the email without proper authorizations.  The email incident eventually boiled over after some lawsuits and union talks.

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