Reassurance for Dummies

From our Workplace For Dummies files.

We deviated from our usual policy of asking a contributor with immediate experience of the subject. Being laid off does not need to be re-lived.

Instead, someone who saw plenty of others laid off wrote this.

The first large scale layoff I saw from close up happened during the "dot com" bust.

I was a worker bee, an "individual contributor" as they call it. One Tuesday morning, people started to get agitated as the cubicles filled up.

Did you hear anything? Do you know what happened?

One adjacent cubicle remained empty.

Our manager came in at around nine and immediately called a meeting.

You may have heard by now, we had some layoffs. You will not be affected, all of you are safe, and we wanted to make sure you knew this.

After a bit more of this, the work of those who had been let go was redistributed and it was over.

I had a chat with our manager after the meeting, and he explained that upper management had convened a surprise meeting the evening before. He also explained that "this was it. Guaranteed, no more layoffs."

To which I responded: If the economy continues like this, there will be more layoffs, and they will be a lot bigger.

I remember how surprised he was, but he remained steadfast: it's over.

I left the company about six months later, and another six months later, I received a phone call from him early in the morning. He did not say good morning or give his name: you were right, he blurted out.

Right about what?

About layoffs, they laid off over 2000 people this morning.

It was very nice that he remembered and wanted to tell me. And I have never stopped wondering how the cumulative effect of "we are good" followed by another round of firings affects people. I cannot even exclude that I am wrong - maybe there is no cumulative effect, maybe most people do not end up in a more cynical state of mind, although, as friends from those days get older and talk more openly, I feel more confirmed in my views.

I even think that "ageism", not hiring older people, may sometimes have less to do with age itself and a lot more with the knowledge that they have been there, they have seen too much to be "hurrah passionate" about a job.

Why tell this old story now?

Because we can see very similar processes and decisions at work in something as different as the Cyprus bailouts.