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OK, so I'm probably not supposed to tell you this, but I'm going to tell
you anyway...
Around about April, a bunch of big wigs from the USA come over and call
an "all hands meeting". They like doing this. It never used to happen in
the old days. But recently, the company likes to hold lots of pointless
meetings. Usually it's just so some visitor can say "hi, my name is
Fred, and here's all the fabulous stuff I'm doing to help grow the company".
Of course, nobody actually gives a fig. We don't /care/ which companies
you've visited or what your strategic plan is. We only care about when
the next batch of samples are going to arrive through the door. But
still, the company likes to hold these pointless meetings.
So everybody gets squished into this meeting room which isn't really big
enough and doesn't have enough chairs. And then these two Americans
start telling us how the future is black as darkest night, and that
there is simply no hope. "Fundamentally, there is no place in the market
for a business unit such as this."
OK, so, uh, where are you guys going with this? C'mon, we've been stood
here for half an hour now. Spit it out. What are you trying to tell us?
"We may have to close the UK site. We are currently entering into a
consultation period. This is your opportunity to give us ideas for how
we can keep the site open."
Now let me back up here for a moment. When I first joined this company
10 years ago, they were making several million USD in losses annually.
As far as I know, for the last 10 years they have never, at any time,
made any kind of profit. Sometimes we made a big loss, and sometimes we
made a small loss. But we /always/ made a loss.
On a site-by-site basis, the UK was usually the only profitable site.
But that changed after our only member of sales staff left and the order
books emptied. Since that day, the UK has never really recovered. It's
always been exceptionally quiet. Has been for years now.
But there is hope: Top management finally agreed to pay out for some
very expensive brand-new mass spectrometers. Not quite state of the art,
but certainly high-end. Previously ALL of our mass spec equipment has
been old junk that we got cheap because somebody was throwing it in the
skip. We've never owned *new* equipment like this before.
We also purchased shiny new HPLC systems to go with it. These systems
are really quite impressive; they record a complete history of the pump
pressure, oven temperature, and inside leg measurement of the operator.
We also purchased the latest version of the mass spec control software;
we've only just finished installing and testing it. All this new
equipment has yet to analyse a single sample. (At least, one from a
paying customer. Obviously we've run all sorts of test samples...)
In light of all this, we've just signed two huge contracts with two
brand-new customers, within weeks of each other. These contracts are far
larger than anything the UK has ever secured before. They promise to
bring millions of dollars into the company.
...and they're closing us NOW?? Just as we've turned a corner? Just as
the equipment you just bought for us has started delivering multiple
major new contracts?
Are you mental??
So anyway, we have thirty days to discuss this with management and try
to figure out a way to keep the UK site open. That was what they told us
in the meeting.
Now obviously, many of the people who work here have three kids and a
mortgage. The /last/ thing they want is to suddenly be unemployed. So,
as you can imagine, people are pretty upset. And more to the point,
people are horrified that we've worked our arses off and successfully
secured these vital life-giving contracts, and we're being shut down
before we can even /start/ them.
Next day, things took a turn for the worse. The CEO gives an all-hands
meeting for all sites via video conference. And what /he/ said is
completely at variance with what we've just been told.
"The UK site is being closed. Unfortunately, due to legal
complications, we can't just /close/ the UK site, we have to allow a
thirty day consultation period first. But after that, the site will be
closed."
In other words, this isn't thirty days to decide IF the site can be
saved. The decision has already been made. It's just that the USA has
employER protection laws, while the UK has employEE protection laws. And
those pesky laws mean you can't just destroy people's lives on a whim.
You have to consider other options.
Or rather, you have to /pretend/ to consider other options. Because it's
now perfectly clear that the company has /no intention/ of listening to
our suggestions. The decision-making process is over. Our jobs are gone.
There is nothing we can do about it.
Some of us want to drag the process out as long as possible, so we can
continue getting paid. But it turns out, because the company is publicly
traded, we're not allowed to tell anyone that the site is closing. Which
makes it A LITTLE BIT AWKWARD when customers phone up to enquire how
their projects are going.
So anyway, we elect a team of staff representatives, and they (together
with the site GM, who will also lose his job) put together a
hard-hitting presentation to our CEO. They present the facts:
- We've just signed two huge contracts, which will have to be cancelled
if the site closes.
- It will cost a /fortune/ to close the UK site.
- We have to buy out of the lease on the new mass spectrometers.
- We have to pay to have them shipped back. (It takes 6 people to
move one of these things, they're extremely fragile, and they cost
$250,000 *each*.)
- We have to pay to turn the lab back into an office. (Hint: It's
never /been/ an office. It was built as a lab when the building was
constructed, because we specifically asked for it.)
- We have to turn the archive room back into an office. (It's
currently a concrete bunker with a thick steel door and no cabling inside.)
means emptying it, hiring contractors to dismantle it, hiring couriers
to remove the equipment, and hiring more contractors to build an office
there, with cables and floors and walls and so forth.)
- We have to buy out of the lease on the building.
- We have to pay redundancy money to people who've worked here 10+ years.
The CEO is dumbstruck. He simply has no reply. He had absolutely NO IDEA
we had just secured new work. He didn't know the half of what it would
cost. When we asked questions, he simply could not answer. He was unable
to provide any justification.
And that's because, for all the statements about the company's
"financial situation" necessitating this action, this is /clearly/
political, not financial. Financially it makes no sense at all. What's
/really/ happening here is that the shareholders are screaming for
blood, so the CEO has to be seen to be visibly "doing something".
The shareholders don't work here. They don't know what's really
happening internally. So they don't know that this is an utterly stupid
idea. But we do. The trouble is, the shareholders wanted blood, so the
CEO just decided, on a whim, that this was the right course of action.
Didn't consult anybody, didn't research anything, didn't do his
homework. That's why he didn't know about the new contracts, and that's
why he vastly underestimated both the time-scale and cost of the closure.
The trouble is, now he's told the board of directors "we are closing the
UK". We can't then say "Oh, sorry, I didn't actually bother to check my
god-damned FACTS. It turns out this is actually a really bad idea. Let's
not do it any more." So basically he's now committed to closing us. Our
staff representatives made a compelling, water-tight case against
closure. The CEO had no reply. But still, he completely ignored all of
our arguments. The site is still scheduled to close.
Given the total futility of trying to reason with somebody who's mind is
already made up, we unanimously vote to end the consultation period
early. That means that we can be officially told when are release dates
are. And then, at the eleventh hour... another all-hands meeting.
The company's last official press release said that we were closing one
site and "considering restructuring options" for the UK site. Which, to
anyone with half a brain, means "closing the UK site". So a company saw
this and phoned us up to ask if they could buy us.
Let me repeat that: "Fundamentally, there is no future in the market for
a business unit like the UK." And yet, within /days/ of closure being
announced, we already have a potential buyer.
Yes, /clearly/ no future in the market. :-P
It goes without saying that the CEO had made no attempt to /find/ a
buyer. He just decided to close it and that's the end of it. But given a
choice between /spending/ millions of dollars to close us or being
/paid/ money to sell us, the company is understandably very, very keen
to sell. And we'd all like to keep our jobs, thank you very much.
Trouble is, we've just spent the last few weeks telling customers that
we're closing. We've been shredding old paper work, deleting files,
disposing of equipment... and now we might /not/ close? Does anybody
have an UNshredder?
Still, it shows how much the CEO knows about anything. The UK site is
perfectly viable. That's why somebody wants to buy it. Well, there we
are. When this site started, it was a small independent company. Then it
got bought by the Americans. And now it looks like it's going to get
bought again, and become a third company...
It would be nice if that's how it turned out, wouldn't it? Ultimately,
there was no sale. We don't really know why. Perhaps the company
demanded too much money. Perhaps it's the fact that /now/ we have a
completely empty order book and no hope of ever filling it again
ourselves. But whatever it was, after several months of the purchase
process progressing steadily forwards without incident, it was abruptly
halted.
So first we MIGHT be closing, then we WILL be closing, then we MIGHT be
able to talk sense into management, then we WILL be closing, then we
MIGHT be being bought, then we ARE being bought, and now we're NOT being
bought, so we ARE closing... Jesus, what a ride!
But still, at least now we all know where we stand...
But wait. Another all-hands meeting. Hmm, the company say they /might/
not be able to afford to pay us. (!!!) I presume I don't need to
describe the atmosphere in the room when that one went down.
No no, wait, calm down... What the company /actually/ says is that they
might not be able to afford to pay out all this redundancy money all at
once. But what every employee heard was "can't afford to pay"...
So yeah, it seems they can't afford to pay us all the money they legally
owe us all at once. So what happens is that we all go home, and they
keep paying us as normal, until we have all the money we're supposed to
have. Which should take until about Christmas.
In summary, as of the end of this month, I am officially unemployed.
Yay, me. :-?
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