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Radio Shack E-Fires 400 Workers
KingSkippus writes "You've got mail! ...and no job! The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that RadioShack has notified 400 workers by e-mail that they are being laid off. The e-mails state, 'The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.' Nothing says thank you for your years of service to our company quite like an e-boot out the door."
Let's get a hand for RadioShack and their PR skills! I've always wondered when things along this line would start to happen. I'm surprised it didn't become popular to fire people by voicemail when that was the "new" thing. Firings can become a very confrontational situation (especially since the messenger didn't always have a hand in the process), so I wonder if the messenger decided that email would be better than hell.
I'd say this is worse than getting a job application rebuffed by a form letter. With a job application, they don't know you and you really are little more than a name (at best) and a number (at worst) to them. For termination of employment somebody really ought to know who you are and what service you have provided the company. It's inexcusible - and a good indication of what those up the ladder really think about their workers. "Your job is very important to us... please hold."
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Have you ever met a Radio Shack employee? Methinks they should all be fired (and replaced by someone who knows what they are talking about).
I used to want to work there, back when they sold computers and gizmos for hobby electronics instead of being a glorified cell phone store (though I do suppose cell phones are a type of radio, so it is more fitting...)
The news in this is that we've reached that particular point in our society where a corporation doesn't even have to have the common decency to fire people in person. There's a certain lack of class here - sure, corporations have to lay people off sometimes, that's not the problem, it's the fact that this company thinks so little of the mindless drones working for them that they don't even have the common courtesy to force their overworked, underpaid manager to take them into the back and fire them personally. This is about as anonymous and abusive as it can get. Yes, Radio Shack sucks, and yes, management are jackasses. Corporations like to fire people when they're at "peak performance", whether or not the whole company is circling the drain. This doesn't excuse the fact that they've chosen to lay their employees off in the most lazy, insulting way they possibly could.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
Laid-off workers got one to three weeks pay for each year of service, up to 16 weeks for hourly employees and 36 weeks for those with base bay of at least $90,000, the company said.
Hey, at least they are taking care of their upper management with up to 36 weeks of severence pay. Otherwise, they might have to actually give up a whole week of vacation in the Bahamas! Who cares about the nameless masses below them. That's why they are nameless masses!
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
The firing of employees by email is just another way to automate away just another management function. If people find it acceptable to be fired by an email, rather than a face to face meeting with a manager, then this means we are just one more step to automating away most of management in company decision making. Anything that eliminates the jobs of useless corporate butt munchers who are adept at convincing their superiors they are valued exployees in the company with "people skills" is not just a good thing, but a great thing.
This means that eventually expert systems and other AI based systems will execute all firings in a fair and objective fashion. If you fail to meet your quotas, the "Virtual CEO 9000" will fire you with a nice little trite email. If you meet your quotas, then the "Virtual CEO 9000" may indeed give you a raise. No performance review will ever again be necessary where you have to interview for keeping your own job every year through kissing up to your former human manager, rather the "Virtual CEO 9000" will instead be constantly evaluating your usefulness to the corporation in real-time and compensate you objectively.
Just imagine what this would do for a company like Oracle that has about 10 maybe 11 engineers doing all the real work in the company with about 50,000 managers whose idea of work is schmoozing with other like-minded individuals on a golf course all day long. The "Virtual CEO 9000" could cut out so much bloat that profits would go so through the roof that Larry Ellison could pay down the entire United States national debt of 65 trillion dollars or whatever it happens to be right now.
Seriously, I have not figured out why the board of directors at our largest corporations has not already outsourced or automated away executive management yet, when they happen to be the least efficient and least accountable group of people in your typical corporation these days. The "Virtual CEO 9000" doesn't need stock options to the tune of 400 million dollars like one of Exxon's former CEO's, instead it just needs some electricity to make the kind of decisions that your typical corporate bean counter makes based solely upon some Microsoft Excel spreadsheet calculation where they say "AHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAA THERE IS THE FAT WE NEED TO CUT. THAT DARNED IT DEPARTMENT IS NOT SELLING ANYTHING AND INSTEAD IS JUST COSTING US A LOT OF MONEY, LET'S FIRE SOME EXPLOYEES AND SLASH THEIR BUDGET!".
Oh wait, I forgot that modern corporations usually have a board of directors that also just happens to be personal friends of the executive management they are supposed to be directing. Nevertheless, my point still stands that being managed by a cold, unfeeling, computer application like the "Virtual CEO 9000" is still better than being managed by the sociopaths that typically run our public companies today.
It DOES inspire me.. It inspires me to use another vendor for my needs. I see little reason to reward such corporate behavior, and in a capitalist society you comment on such displeasure with your dollars. Fortunately there is the Web.....because I already dispise Fry's...
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
But not for the reasons you might think. The natural reaction is that it's too impersonal. That's really the least of the problems. The big problem with email is that it's not reliable, and not very official. What's to stop someone sending out a prank notice to non-fired rad-shack employees that says they're fired? Maybe you don't like the rad-shack guy you work with (and you've already been fired), so you send out a fake email to him with headers that look like it comes from rad-shack and the same body as yours. How's your (former) co-worker going to know he wasn't actually fired?
Email isn't reliable either. There's no guarantee that people read their email on a regular basis, and even if they did spam filters can filter out an email like this.
AccountKiller
They asked you to a meeting. That is a reasonable, and professional course of action to take. People get laid off, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad. The real problem with the article is not that some people were laid off, but that they were told by e-mail not to bother coming in anymore. HP at least gave you the courtesy of a face to face.
The idea that your not even worth a face to face firing, would be devasating to most people. I don't see how it could be worse.
Who ever did the e-firing, didn't do there job. Or at least avoided the hard part of it. If you're going to fire some one. If you're going to tell them they aren't needed anymore. It would have been decent to tell them in person.
Anyone who thinks this is no big deal, was either never fired or didn't like the job they were fired from. You also can't assume the ones being fired don't care, or don't like there job. Everyone deserves to be fired by a person, no matter how much prior notice they were giving. You don't KNOW you are fired, until you are fired.
Those endorsing this problaly want to use it in the future, because they don't have the cojones to fire someone in person.
"Common decency" ... hmm, maybe exists in some 50s romantic B-movie comedies, but alas, welcome to the real world pal. That stuff never existed. Read your histories of work and industry through the ages. Watch a few Monty Python sketches if that's too boring (something about working in coal mines and getting up at 5am and being grateful for it: Victorian decency didn't have a problem with sending 5 year olds down mines and up chimneys after all). That's why unions got going in the first place, to actually give the little guys some real power rather than having individuals just sitting at home feeling shocked after layoff at the wake up call that they weren't actually working for a paternalistic social enterprise.
If you don't like the word 'union' then pick another, but you need some sort of collective ability to organise and respond when the big guys put the pressure on. They screw around with your workmates, you all stop work and threaten to take the company down if they don't start behaving better. Drastic, sure, but the USA is *proud* of its free market hire em and fire em attitude, you aren't going to get some middle manager to change their way by asking them to remember the unwritten rules of Lord's cricket ground and the British Raj. They are watching over their shoulder as well...
The news in this is that we've reached that particular point in our society where a corporation doesn't even have to have the common decency to fire people in person.
What kind of phantasy world do you live in? Labor rights and relations have come a long way since the 19th centuries; companies didn't use to fire employees by E-mail, they used to work them to death and kill them.
You're confusing a company with a thinking, feeling person. Companies are like big, impersonal machines, and they have always been. Complaining about being fired by E-mail makes just about as much sense as taking the BSOD or a washing machine malfunction as a personal insult. The company doesn't want you anymore, so just move on. If people get fired too often in your opinion, then the solution is to fix the system (by working for more labor rights), not to whine about the form in which you get fired.
Congrats, you should be a manager, maybe even a board member or CEO, if your view of the world is that sociopathic.
Human interactions are not measured just in how many dollars they make for your (or their) bottom line. Sometimes you can take 5 minutes off your busy schedule just, you know, for the sake of making someone's day less shitty. Just because it's the humane thing to do. Someone has just been fired, and it won't kill you to just say a few soothing words and show (or fake) some compassion. Or just show that someone at least remembers their name, or that they worked there. Put a human/humane face on the whole deal, you know.
Yes, being fired is just normal and just part of how the economy works. It's not the end of the world. Etc. But it's still a stressful event in someone's life. It won't kill you to lower someone's stress a little.
It's also an awakening to the cruel reality that, for all the bullshit "we're all a big family" speeches, you're just a nameless disposable cog in the corporate machine. A cog that's served its purpose, produced all the profit that could be made, and now is disposed of when no longer profitable. All the "we're all a big family" idea not only flies out the window, but it turns out that it's never been true anyway. That's not how families work.
And that's not a cheerful thought. Humans aren't robots, and the millions of years of evolution have sorta hard-wired us to be social beings. Our brains are wired for person-to-person relations, not for a nameless-cog-to-faceless-entity existence. That's too why we build father figures in the sky (i.e., religion), or conspiracy theories with a few people responsible for all this or that, or anthropomorphise our computer/boat/gun/whatever. Because that's the kind of thing we're wired for, and the kind of thing we understand: _people_, not faceless machineries.
And the kind of email oozing an "you're one of the nameless drones we're discarding today" tone, like these people received, only serve to amplify that to the maximum impact possible. It's just twisting the knife in the wound. In the ammo arsenal of unpleasant human interactions, this is the dum-dum.
And if you're willing to advocate that just because the humane alternative is "just a total logistical nightmare"... well, as I was saying, you have some serious upper management potential.
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Not at all. If I'm ever in the position where I need to fire somebody, I would definitely do so in person.
I know this is a huge deal for the people involved, and I'm not excusing Radio Shack's actions; I'm saying that there could have been far, far worse mistakes than the one they made.
I don't see anybody endorsing this course of action; I know I'm not. I just think this is not the worst possible outcome. Employees could have not been given any warning; they could have been fired without a severance package, instead of up to nine months of free pay; or they could have been escorted off the premises by security instead of a manager. Radio Shack's blunder seems mild compared to what others have done.
Think about this for a second - how does it make the rest of the people who still work for you feel. When I worked at a US corporation, HR was spending huge amount of time and money getting everyone to feel like a part of a family - all the better to get people to work hard, and not steal things. I guess Radio Shack doesn't have this sort of ethos.
If I still worked at Radio Shack, why should I give a shit about the company - and stuff like that shows.
- Radio Shack Canada is no longer affiliated with Radio Shack USA
- Radio Shack Canada no longer exists
- Radio Shack Canada is now "Circuit City: The Source"
- They now carry more electronics components than they have in 5-10 years
At least there is some place local where I can buy SOME components again. I'm happy. Digikey is great, but you just can't run out and grab something you suddenly need when your main supplier is mail order.
I just wish they still carried those little Archer PCBs etched for a single ~14-pin DIP. I used my second-last one last weekend.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Um, it sounds like the company won:
Even if they do have what I need, it's usually hideously overpriced. I've given up on Radio Shack (or The Source or whatever it's called now) for my parts. As nice as it is to be able to get things from a brick-and-mortar (since I'm very impatient), I've found that using http://www.digikey.com/ is just better all-around.
Being the product of a recent major layoff, I can definitely add some thoughts to this. Had my employer of 8 years taking the b*tch way out and sent me an email letting me know I was one of the unfortunates who was being let go, I more than likely would have been angry and beligerant about the whole affair. Sure, they had meetings discussing their intentions, but still, its demeaning to have a souless company further prove that point by issuing a sterile, cold email letting you know that your life has just been flushed down the toilet. And yes, the severance is a nice gesture, but I'm gonna tell you right now...I got 27-weeks worth of severance when I was let go and while it is a nice chunk of change...it bites you in the a$$ in the long run as you're taxed higher for the lump amount, leaving me with $12,000 of my $19,000 severance. While this isn't the worst thing to do to someone, it still would be demoralizing to know you were the recipient of a form email that took someone 3 minutes to type and no emotion whatsoever. At least with my layoff my boss was there and I watched the man break down in tears. No matter what the circumstances, someone being let go needs compassion and encouragement...sending a "get out" email doesn't do the trick.
Did Radio Shack's (mis)management really think that they could sustain, let alone grow, their national chain just by being a cellphone reseller? Every cellphone provider has company stores now, and soon every town will have one. Which means they have every incentive to cut resellers and their commissions out of the picture. Once Radio Shack has nothing to fall back on besides substandard and overpriced electronics, its liquidation time.
It makes a big difference to hear it in person, I think.
When I was laid off by Unisys back in 1992 after working for them for almost five years, it helped cushion the blow to see how hard my manager (who is the one who told me) was taking it all. He was told from above to let three of our four-person programming team go that same day - our side of the Airline Center ended up laying off 20% of the staff all told - and it really shook him up, even though we all knew for months that it was coming.
When I was laid off by Northwest Airlines in January 2002 after eight years, hearing the news from my director also helped, since he was obviously not happy that the layoff was occurring, and again that helped a little to cushion the blow (and I needed it that time, since that was a layoff I *didn't* see coming since I'd survived the mass layoffs after September 11th. We thought they were done).
An e-mail message telling you you've been let go is impersonal as hell. I'd really be angry about something like that. Hearing it in person shows a little bit of class on the part of the organization, at least IMO.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I'm surprised that the email spammers weren't all over this one. All you'd need to do is find out what email addy those emails were sent out from... and then dictionary spam the radioshack email addy's with that message. In Current News... 90% of radioshack employees did not show up for work today as they all thought they were fired. lol gg.
Some of us aren't like that. I chose to work for Northwest Airlines, for example, because I had a few years of previous exposure to the airline industry and I wanted to work as a programmer FOR A MAJOR AIRLINE. Period. And while I worked there, I wasn't just a programmer, applications, one each. I was an applications programmer in the heart of their flight operations group. If my code failed, the airline didn't fly. Literally. And it felt good to feel like the stuff I was doing was a critical part of the actual operation.
Northwest was a company I felt very strongly about. I loved working there, and I'm still proud to know that I have something like 100,000 lines of code still running in their WorldFlight production system and handling a large percentage of their ACARS and surface weather traffic, as well as doing various other things. But it hurt me quite a bit personally when I was laid off because I'd invested over a decade of time (between contractor time and employee time) in that system, and I was really proud to be part of that particular group.
It hurt to leave, but I'm glad I was there. I do like where I am now, and I'm proud of what I do, but it's not the same.
I want to create software that actually MEANS something. I like working on projects that will have a real impact on some aspect of the company, and I sometimes put a lot of time and emotional energy into the designs I create.
Coding is a means to an end, certainly, but for me it's also an end in itself. The problem solving and design aspects are satisfying IN THEMSELVES for me, and I'm actually quite proud of some of the things that I've been able to accomplish so far in my short 18-year career as a programmer.
When I was at NWA, I would still be working there even if I had won the lottery. Why? Because that was a working and technical environment that I very much enjoyed being a part of, and solving problems in that context was a fun activity in its own right. I *WANTED* to go to work every day.
I believe that programming is art at a certain level, and I believe there is nothing wrong with an artist feeling some form of emotion over the works he creates.
If you don't get the kind of satisfaction that I do after coming up with a particularly elegant fix for a problem or a particularly efficient design, then I feel sorry for you because I think you are missing out on one of the really neat things about being a programmer. Our profession is to weave webs of logic and structure out of nothing! I think the whole virtual world of computing is an amazing thing, even magical in a way.
I agree that your job should not be you, but I don't have a problem with people who are willing to put some of their heart and soul into their work. It's one of the things which differentiates good software from great software, I think. For some people, passion is important. I was just going through the motions here, I'd be ready to find a different career. Instead, I'm doing what I love: writing software. I hope I'm able to do it for another 18 years, and hopefully until I retire...Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.