Bev,

Wow!  It has been my experience that one week per year of service is
'customary' for a severance package.  It surely would have been a great deal
easier with a month per year of service!!

Owens sounds like [it was] a company from the 'Old school'.  Nowadays, with
everything being bottom-line oriented, the accountants appear to run the
show.  It sometimes appears that Engineers are an 'unnecessary expense' to
many accountants [kind of like a person on welfare complaining about their
payments from the taxpayers - I have yet to see an accountant contribute to
generating physical goods going out the door].

The old-school companies are still out there, but as the entrepreneurs die
off and get replaced by accountants, the quantities decrease.

At least those are my observations

Inge - not all US companies are that barbaric.

Steve 

-----Original Message-----
From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bev Christian
Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2009 2:08 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [TN] NTC RE: [TN] On the way to being unemployed....

OR a company can do it as well as can be expected.  For instance, when I got
laid off by Fiberglas Canada (Owens Corning subsidiary) in 1989, they:
1) Let us know in advance by several weeks that a lay off was coming
2) Told us why it was coming
3) Did it all within a couple of hours
4) Had our own managers tell us individually
5) Immediately assigned us to a counselor from the moment we left the
manager's office
6) Quickly took us to a room with said counselor and 7 of our compatriots
where we could talk about how we felt and to explain what was next
7) Gave us two weeks to clean out our offices on company time
8) Gave us a three day course on how to look for work (I still have that
binder.), with mock taped interviews, etc.
9) Set us all up in an office (an old bank, ironically) for three months
with a table, phone, no charge for long distance phone calls, a secretary,
photocopier and several daily newspapers of major Canadian cities.
10) Oh, and one month's severance for every year worked and half a month's
pay if there was an additional half month worked. 

My manager was the perfect English gentleman throughout.  I remember that
one other manager broke down giving his purchasing agent the bad news.  But
the good part is the guy getting laid off, who had been with the company
since high school, got severance for, I think, about 15 years of service.
Then they brought him back full time within a few months, then laid him off
again, gave him a full severance, brought him back a third time and then
laid him off and AGAIN gave him a full severance from the time he had
originally joined the company.  Talk about making out like a bandit!

For myself I then a got a great job with Nortel that I stayed at for ten
years, nine and a half wonderful years and six months of crap, but that's
another story.

Bev
On vacation





-----Original Message-----
From: TechNet [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of R Sedlak
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2009 4:47 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [TN] On the way to being unemployed....

The thing that most people lose track of is that, at the end of the day, the
corporation needs good people more than the people need a specific
corporation...

I have been in this sort of situation a number of times, and have managed to
dodge the bullet by going out BEFORE being laid off, and finding a job, and
then going to management, and saying that as much as I LOVE this place, and
do not want to leave, I must, unless I get a guarantee, in writing, that I
will not be laid off for at least a year.   I got the guarantee in one case,
and in the other, got to walk out (to a new job) a week ahead of when I
would have been laid off.

The concept is best described as being pro-active, or Carpe Diem?
Rudy Sedlak
----------------------



      

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