Hi colleagues, this is going to be an unpopular post here. And for the record I am not from the family, or leadership, HR, or comms. Just a regular old Joe. The company does not owe us a living. At the end of the day, we entered into a transactional contract. Our time for a salary. The whole "we are a family" talk about values is what every company does. If we believed it to the extent that we now feel betrayed, that's on us. Surely we cannot be that naive. They did not promise us lifelong tenure and anyone shocked at being let go based on how long you have been there, is just delusional. The company exists to make profits, and we can debate how much profits should they make to be "fair", but is that something you would personally do? And if I were completely honest with myself...some of us, myself included, were excess capacity. I have been done with work at 2pm on a weekday. I know other colleagues who regularly log off mid afternoon to pick up their kids and never log back. Are we all truly fully utilized to the number of hours we are actually paid to be present? I would say first that I was not in corporate. Maybe in the plants where you clock in/out that's different.
No doubt the process could have been better managed, the leaders could be less wooden in their messages, and this is very upsetting. But maybe we could just move on with this reality if we accept that this was all along, a contract we entered into, and no one promised us lifetime employment and some of us were indeed excess capacity.