Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be on the other side of a firing or layoff? One of the downsides to being a boss is having to let people go, especially when it’s not because they deserve it. Well, now The Washington Post introduces you to “The Five O’Clock Club” – an “outplacement” firm. What, you may ask, is outplacement? It’s a corporate buzzword for laying people off. And companies like The Five O’Clock Club (which I’ll call T5OCC) come in to help companies figure out which people to lay off and how.
While the point of this article is probably to help people – especially ones who lost their jobs recently and are pissed about it – sympathize with what it’s like to be the layer-offer, it doesn’t do much to humanize the characters. Having employees of T5OCC spout off lists of names and numbers – six here, 20 there – doesn’t make me feel sorry for them. If anything, it makes them look like vultures, who are surviving by feeding off of the dying. Take paragraphs like this, for example:
The Five O’Clock Club has nearly doubled in size during the past two years, and Hall has guided more than 200 companies and 1,500 laid-off workers through downsizings in the past six months. The Club, as it is sometimes called, charges each company about $2,000 per fired employee in exchange for providing layoff victims with a year of career coaching. The more businesses that suffer, the better for business at the Club. When Hall joined the company in 2007, she read in the employee handbook that “from time to time, employees will receive small bonuses when the company is doing exceptionally well.” Now those bonuses come almost every month.
Maybe I should reward these people for their business acumen, but all I feel like doing is being mad that they exist in the first place.
When bosses say they want their personal assistants to be available at any time, some of them really mean it. Jennifer LeRoy, who owns the popular New York restaurant Tavern On the Green, allegedly fired assistant Jamie Mora just a week after Mora told her boss she was pregnant. The New York Post reports that Mora is now suing LeRoy for back wages and damages.
The high-strung heiress hired Mora to handle her personal and business affairs in 2004 and to make herself “available to Ms. LeRoy 24 hours a day, seven days a week throughout her tenure at Tavern,” according to court papers.
Who knows whether Mora could have worked during her pregnancy? I mean, Katherine Heigl’s assistant managed to fetch her boss Coke Zero while heavily pregnant, so there does seem to be a precedent.
Kendra was always my favorite “Girl Next Door,” despite her braying laugh, because she seemed to be the only one not playing a weird role or speaking forced dialogue for the cameras. Now, Kendra has her own spinoff that details her marriage to football player Hank Baskett and her impending motherhood. So what happens when you become big enough to get your own self-titled reality show? You get an assistant, of course.
Rather than go through the process of interviewing people, Kendra hired her brother’s girlfriend Maranie to be her PA. However, while Kendra liked Maranie’s good attitude and organizational skills, she didn’t really know how to be an assistant. Kendra, as far as I can tell, didn’t put a lot of effort into training Maranie, although she did ask for very specific things, so Maranie at least had something to go on. However, the relationship didn’t last very long – Maranie made it about three episodes before Kendra fired her for not helping out enough when Kendra prepared a big dinner for some of Hank’s teammates and their spouses.
It seems like Maranie is still dating Kendra’s brother, though – perhaps they could have called Bethany Hamilton and asked for her advice about keeping assistants in the family?
One thing that’s always bugged me about reality TV is how people are able to leave their jobs for a month or six weeks or however long the show takes to tape. Sure, maybe some of them have lots of accumulated unused vacation time or are self-employed or something, but that is part of the reason reality TV is so chock full of aspiring actors or unemployed people.
Well, last night, some of my “how do you get your job to let you do this?” questions were finally answered on – of all places – The Bachelorette. Ed, one of the guys left in the running to win Canadian singleton Jillian’s (pictured at right) heart and a viewer favorite, got an angry call from his boss while taping the show in Whistler, British Columbia. The boss told Ed that he either had to come back immediately or be fired. Thus the perfect storyline for the show: love or money?
How many times do I have to tell people not to bone their coworkers?
Sometimes it means you get fired and publicly embarrassed. Sometimes it means office politics are thrown out of whack and, when you stop boning, things at the office get mega-awkward. And sometimes, things like this happen: a pair of coworkers, Salvatore and Angelina, couldn’t contain their passion for each other at the clothing store where they worked in Bergamo, Italy. Consumed by lust, they got it on in the bathroom, only to get stuck when Angelina developed a leg cramp. They were eventually found and rescued – by Angelina’s husband, who (shockingly!) was pretty pissed about the whole situation.
Both Salvatore and Angelina were dumped by their respective spouses, and Salvatore got fired. Angie, however, got to keep her job after it was determined she’d finished her shift before they started doing the nasty. Got to love the Italians.
Anyway, the moral of this story? Don’t bone your coworkers. And if you really can’t resist, at least wait until you get home.
Assistants are far from being the only mistreated ones in the office. This horror story comes via The Angry Office Manager who is, well, an office manager.
It was Dana who interviewed for my Office Manager position at GoGorilla Media. It was Dana who officially hired me over the phone; and on my first day, it was Dana who enthusiastically greeted me as I got off the elevator. She asked me if she could call me Mandy. I only go by Mandy with my close friends and my family, because I’m just not a Mandy. But when she called to offer me the job, I had just set up an Ebay account to sell my only pair of Prada shoes, so in my mind, she saved me and could call me whatever she wanted.
Dana had set up my desk with colorful pens and markers, the kind you ogle at art stores, but never actually buy, because although you covet them, it just seems too silly to spend money on such things. She had written me a welcome note on yellow construction paper and covered it in stars and hearts and smiley faces and everything else that a thirteen year old might draw on the cover of her notebook. It was Dana that I fired, inadvertently, a mere three months later.
Imagine if your company hired you from another country just to do a job. You ended up staying in the country for a long time, marrying, having kids, buying a home, and then one day the country fell on hard financial times and told you to get out.
That’s exactly what happened to many workers from countries like Brazil and Peru who emigrated to Japan to take blue-collar jobs that Japanese workers couldn’t fill. As industry boomed, more and more foreigners got jobs in Japan. But now that the global economy is on a downswing, Japan is offering these workers a deal – they’ll pay for them to go back to their home countries, if they promise never to come back and seek a job in Japan ever again. For people who have spent much of their lives living and working in Japan, often because of a lack of opportunities in their native country, it’s a heartbreaking decision.
The New York Times has a more in-depth article about what’s going on in Japan.
As its newsstand sales plummet and the entire magazine industry is in freefall, Vogue magazine has had to do things it never would have done in the past. Instead of only write about luxury and expensive things and people who are ten times more beautiful and fabulous than you’ll ever be, they have to occasionally look like they’re in touch with the regular folk. That’s why on the cover of the May issue there’s a headline that would be right at home on any magazine in your grocery store aisle – “You’re Fired! Surviving and Thriving After the Pink Slip.” However, because this is Vogue, the story isn’t about a working class person who got laid off and is struggling to make ends meet. Instead, it’s a first person essay by longtime Village Voice fashion writer Lynn Yaeger (pictured at left), who was laid off last year. While I think Yaeger is a good writer and her firing from the Voice was upsetting, I have a really hard time a) identifying with her, and b) not rolling my eyes continually during her article. If Yaeger wrote her piece [which is not available online, or I'd link to it] in bullet points, here’s what she’d advise you to do in your own layoff situation:
The only thing shittier than getting laid off would have to be getting laid off in public. So, of course, now you have a chance to do exactly that.
A new reality show called Someone’s Gotta Go is currently in production. The show (which will air, obviously, on Fox) “enters real businesses across the country and gives employees the power to decide which one of them will be terminated.” Here’s more on the show from Variety:
Each episode will revolve around a different small business — usually one with 15-20 employees — that has been forced to make staff reductions because of the sour economy.
The company’s books will be opened up to the employees, who will learn what everyone makes and what’s in their human resources files. Employees will also get a chance to say, face to face, what they really think of one another.
Ultimately, the employees will vote on who should be terminated. That person will likely receive a small severance, but that’s it.
Talk about a great opportunity for a layoff narrative, huh? And who the hell are they going to get to host this thing?
On last night’s episode of The Celebrity Apprentice (which is proving weirdly addictive this season), Donald Trump fired Khloe Kardashian. He did not fire her for incompetence (which might have been a valid claim); rather, he fired her when he discovered that she had been busted for a DUI before appearing on the show. He claimed that, had he known this information, he never would have allowed her to be cast in the first place. While Khloe was far from my favorite contestant this season, I’m not sure how I feel about her firing coming because of something that didn’t relate to her performance on the show. What do you think?
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be on the other side of a firing or layoff? One of the downsides to being a boss is having to let people go, especially when it’s not because they deserve it. Well, now The Washington Post introduces you to “The Five O’Clock Club” – an “outplacement” firm. What, you may ask, is outplacement? It’s a corporate buzzword for laying people off. And companies like The Five O’Clock Club (which I’ll call T5OCC) come in to help companies figure out which people to lay off and how.
Kendra was always my favorite “Girl Next Door,” despite her braying laugh, because she seemed to be the only one not playing a weird role or speaking forced dialogue for the cameras. Now, Kendra has her own spinoff that details her marriage to football player Hank Baskett and her impending motherhood. So what happens when you become big enough to get your own self-titled reality show? You get an assistant, of course.
One thing that’s always bugged me about reality TV is how people are able to leave their jobs for a month or six weeks or however long the show takes to tape. Sure, maybe some of them have lots of accumulated unused vacation time or are self-employed or something, but that is part of the reason reality TV is so chock full of aspiring actors or unemployed people.
How many times do I have to tell people not to bone their coworkers?
As its newsstand sales plummet and the entire magazine industry is in freefall, Vogue magazine has had to do things it never would have done in the past. Instead of only write about luxury and expensive things and people who are ten times more beautiful and fabulous than you’ll ever be, they have to occasionally look like they’re in touch with the regular folk. That’s why on the cover of the May issue there’s a headline that would be right at home on any magazine in your grocery store aisle – “You’re Fired! Surviving and Thriving After the Pink Slip.” However, because this is Vogue, the story isn’t about a working class person who got laid off and is struggling to make ends meet. Instead, it’s a first person essay by 
The only thing shittier than getting laid off would have to be getting laid off in public. So, of course, now you have a chance to do exactly that.
