Get him, quick
Getting laid off seems to be the flavour of moment. Monday’s news brought news of workers at the BMW factory in Cowley, Oxford getting the boot. I caught the last few seconds on the radio of one worker talking about the situation, “And the worst thing was,” he said “we were told with only an hour, that our jobs were finishing.”
My sympathies are with those people and their families, especially as it seemed many wouldn’t receive redundancy pay. The shock of suddenly finding you’re without a job is disorientating. But the situation can be even worse. I was chatting to someone at the weekend who works for a major financial institution.
This bloke is in IT and takes care of the employees computer IDs. Recently he got a call asking if he could see a colleague whose desk was behind his. When he said the man wasn’t at his desk, and in fact was in a meeting room with HR, the voice said “right, kill his user ID”. Human Resources was sacking him there and then so his log-in had to be removed before he could return to his desk and potentially cause havoc in the system.
I suppose the equivalent for manual workers would be a trap door in the floor. Perhaps office chairs could be fitted with a James Bond car like ejector seat that would catapult redundant employees heaven-ward.
Tags: bmw factory cowley, financial institution, james bond car, Redundancy