Blue Angels Separate

Oh, when the saints go marching in
Oh, when the saints go marching in
Lord I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in

Last month, my boss sat me and all of his ‘senior’ staff down and introduced the company’s new Voluntary Layoff Opportunity (VLO). By senior staff is meant here, anyone in the top half of the pay scale, not including executives. Some like me are getting on in years, while others are still quite young and have families with very small children. The VLO program offers at most, a half-year’s salary as a separation bonus. It is certainly not intended for some of the thirty-some-things that were in that meeting, but that is the way corporate America functions these days. Everyone is treated equally, until they are not. I will go on the record to say that I will not be participating in this program. I say this bluntly, because last time I broached this subject on this blog a certain someone, you know who you are, misunderstood what I was saying. Anyway, response has been much more enthusiastic than I ever expected and from what my manager relayed, the response is more than the company expected too. Now the company has left itself an out of sorts, the voluntary in VLO works both ways, both the company and the employee have to agree to any separations.

One of the side effects that I didn’t foresee was some of the cheerleading that has occurred as part of this process. When anyone at work announces their retirement, I always feel that it is an occasion for celebration. Another one is getting out alive. Trust me, more than a few have not. The company concurs and graciously funds the retirement party. I have been going to more and more of these parties of late and based upon my informal survey of VLO respondents, I’ll be going to quite a few more of them the rest of this year. What I didn’t expect though was the cheerleading that has erupted from the younger thirty and forty year-olds. Most of these people are members of the forever-fours demographic, grade four engineers that have been chafing under the company’s higher grade level promotion moratorium for on five years now. They somehow figure that if the existing fives and sixes leave, then the company will finally promote them in their place. I don’t think that it is going to work like that. The whole point of this VLO exercise is to steepen the hierarchy again and get it back to the way it use to be and cut company costs.