LindsayRichards wrote:
If they had an unneeded employee that didn't need to be replaced, they should have removed him first. That is the way it works in the private sector. ....
Not when I was there, from 1960 to 2003. In my first management job in 1965 I had an extra guy and told the boss so, and he was soon gobbled up by another department, but when I needed an extra hand no one was available! I had a hell of a time getting someone! So I quit telling the truth, just like everyone else. Thereafter, I always had plenty reasons for hanging onto every soul I could. Call me bad, call me evil, but I always got my projects done on time and under budget, and I could prove it!
I never met a manager who was willing to giveup people or budget. Not a successful one, anyway. And it costs a lot more to hire a new guy than to keep an old one, especially if he knows the ropes. I once had a guy named "Mac" who was hated by every manager he had worked for because he was so independent, but he was smart and he knew every inch of our products. Once in a while someone would ask me "what are you going to do about Mac?" And I'd say "I'd LOVE to fire him. I'd love to take his stuff out on the lawn and burn it myself. But he's the only guy who knows enough about our whizbang product and the whiskey account to actually get it going! Ask me again when we discontinue whizbang or stop selling stuff to drug makers. I'll take him out by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants, throw him in the street, and tell Mac: "...and never come back!".
So we just restricted his raises, as punishment for coming to work at 10AM. Then, 2 months later he turned in his resignation and I walked into the bosses office and gleefully announced "our problem is solved! Mac just resigned!" The Boss looked stony, and said "how can we service the new brandy account, it requires 6 more of those whizbangs!"
You can guess the rest: Mac got a raise to stay on. a couple years later I left to go with a startup, my boss retired, and then Mac, unmarried and frugal, left to go to a chariity he'd been working with parttime, where he developed a charity solicitation and tracking system that soon everyone else wanted, too, so he formed a successful combine with the charity that furnished all his gadgets and such (including a GM EV2). Now, I think of ol' Mac every time I see the name of those whiskey and brandy makers. As for the company we all worked for those couple of years, it's gone, liquidated by the Eastern capitalists who knew nothing about the whiskey or brandy business, selling off assets like whizbang for whatever they could get. As Oscar Wilde put it "they knew the price of everything and the value of nothing".
