Wildan furloughed and laid off a significant amount of employees the first week of California’s shelter in place mandate. Even so far as to fire at least one board member and employees who had been working there for over a decade
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Willdan, in my own opinion, used the COVID event to “clean house” and lay-off employees in the bottom ranks over 60 y/o in a lot of cases (rather than furlough), because they made more, and yes, some there even over 30 years. Your status and power within the company, much more so than what you contributed, reigned in choosing who to let go vs. furlough. If you were “in” then you were safe, even those that put in the hours, the weekends and were the true workhorses. Honestly though isn’t that to be expected in a corporate environment when major cuts occur?? I feel for those there having to now have a lot heavier workloads with reduced percentage exempt salaries and less hours to do so as hours were also cut. I also see the same COVID reactions to large corporates such as AECOM and others. No surprises considering a global pandemic. Takeaway from this situation for any corporate is a completely revised view of how it spends unnecessarily, from huge expensive meals and travel for 20-30 employees when video conferencing was already in place, to other alternative and extremely less expensive ways to accomplish the same thing. Just an opinion.