Why is there a growing trend to treat long term employees badly?
What happened to the gold watch, the praise, the acknowledgement of many years of loyal service?
Why has this been replaced with disdain?
There is a rise in employers terminating long term employees just in the nick of time to avoid paying them pensions, or ripping them off of retirement benefits, or making it impossible to claim unemployment insurance, or get severance pay. This is now followed by bosses treating the employee badly, ignoring them, severing long term relationships where there never was a problem before, everyone was friendly, hell – the employee probably even went to their house for the odd barbeque, knew all about their kids, cared about their problems – maybe even sacrificed their free time to help them out! Worse, fellow employees now join in the fun, berating their co-workers and laughing at their predicament.
Why is this happening?
These are often big corporations that snub the long term employee, who can easily afford to pay their benefits, but prefer to send that money to their CEO’s and shareholders. What gives?
A lot of mean spiritedness is for no reason. They gain nothing by making it difficult for an employee to get unemployment insurance, or medical benefits. I don’t get it.
If businesses are going to behave badly, that is what we have governments for. To force them, by law, to be good stewards over their flock. We need laws to protect our loyal workers.
The only thing I can hope for is a good dose of heavy duty karma on these bastards. After all, one day, they too will be old, and considered useless, even though they have proved for decades they are anything but worthless. They will pay for the mistreatment of their loyal co-workers and employees.