TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response:
You are correct -- companies hate dealing with that. They respond in different ways:
1) Simply eliminating those vacation and pension benefits. 2) Outsourcing the department. 3) Making life a living hell for the employee so he quits and gets no severance. 4) Transferring the employee across the country and/or to a dumpy location. Often such employees are pretty settled and it would involve uplifting kids at a bad time in their lives.Companies today no longer provide those nice benefits people used to enjoy.
There was a good business reason for those benefits: it encouraged longevity which meant companies had experienced people and didn't need to retrain and rehire (which is expensive). But now companies don't care and look at their people no differently than desk chairs or computer monitors.
Years ago the house organ for companies would proudly feature their veteran employees on the cover. No more.
That fifth week of vacation isn't as much concern as pension costs (very high) or health benefits.
Government agencies also had good benefits but they too are under fire to eliminate them. In some cases they "privitize" which is another way of saying 'outsource'. The employees lose all seniority and benefits.
There was an article in Fortune Mag recently about corporate executives in their 50s who face the same problem. These very well paid high-powered people find themselves out of the street along with everyone else (including people they likely had a hand in putting out on the street).
Age discrimination is now illegal, but corporations are creative are circumventing that. As you said, they make a new area restricted to the young turks so the veterans get squeezed out.
The sad part is modern "outsourcing" companies offer next to nothing in benefits. Sometimes the workers aren't even 'employees', but reclassified as "independent contractors" which is even worse for most workers.
Back in the Depression my mother got a job for a small outfit owned by what then was called a "skinflint" boss. If an employee erred and a letter was returned mis-addressed, the employee had to pay for the postage out of their own pocket. When the boss was there, he'd sit behind his roll top desk staring at the staff. But when he was on vacation -- which was often -- the atmosphere was much more relaxed and pleasant.
Today the "boss" never takes a vacation. Companies monitor and record every keystroke, every screen, every phone call, and every restroom break. If you fail to meet quota you're out. If a customer has a tough problem that needs extra time, too bad.
When I came of age I thought unions were too powerful -- they had a lot and seemed to be too greedy. But now the pendulum has swung the other way. We do need unions in many white collar jobs to protect workers. When corporate profits and CEO salaries are so damn high while workers' wages languish, something is out of balance and needs correction.
[public replies please] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Even in the olden days of manual telephone service, operators were expected to keep up a pace of a certain number of calls per minute/hour. The supervisors would see that each operator had a large number of cord pairs up on calls. No certain number of cords, just an average which matched more or less the other operators. Now let's say an operator got some sort of very 'tough' call to handle; it took a few minutes extra to handle. Since operators were taught to 'overlap' (that is, pull down the cords on a finished call while installing a new call [new cord pairs] in the process) after a couple minutes into handling the tough call, her existing connections would have mostly finished and the cords come down, so in essence she was sitting there with 'nothing on her board' except the one tough call she was trying to complete. Sure as the world, that was the moment the supervisor would happen to walk past, and inquire, not necessarily in a gracious way, "what is going on here? You don't seem to stay as busy as your neighbors." It seems the supervisors could not understand that not all calls handled by the operators were routine: (with cord in hand) 'number please', (virtually toss the cord at the jack, start the ringing process) and say 'thank you'; then click off and move on to the next call in the never ending queue. Sometimes the operators _had_ to engage in conversation for a few seconds with a customer, and during that few seconds or maybe a minute of conversation her position would get de-nuded of other connections. And God forbid the customer had a _real_ emergency and the operator had to stay on the line with them for a minute or two, which of course they were trained to do._An operator had a heart attack once while I was speaking to her_. I had called something 555-1212 to get information; the operator answered and took my request; apparently in the process of looking up the desired number, she was stricken; the line went silent, but I could hear people in the background talking, but it was muffled, but obviously a group of anxious people chattering. Curious, I just sat there trying to listen. After about a minute, someone else picks up the headset and says, "may I help you?" and I gave the request again, and got a very prompt answer. I asked what happened to the person who originally answered me? The new voice said to me, "it appears she had a heart attack, the medics are here now to take charge." My goodness!
And Myrtle Murphy, an elderly lady who had been a phone operator for Illinois Bell all of her working career comes to mind. She was the very first _union steward_ in the Franklin Coin office in downtown Chicago. When Ms. Murphy started working for the company, it was not unionized -- in other words just like Sprint or Walmart today. She was approached by some people who asked her to be their representative at the CWA (Communications Workers of America), and she agreed. Many of her fellow employees laughed and mocked her, saying "no one will ever be able to organize the Bell ..." and the supervisors treated her like a pariah; and told the other 'girls' they had better stay away from Myrtle ... she is a trouble maker; associate with her and she will get _YOU_ in trouble as well. Well, the other operators did associate with her, and many of them signed the union cards she presented. And like Walmart, which doesn't hesitate to throw its weight around and make hassles in every community it enters, Illinois Bell threw a lot of its weight around also -- and these were the depression years when if you had a job at all you were very lucky -- and fought to keep the union away.
So Lisa, the olden times were not much different than today. The same ugly corporations and the same ugly bosses in charge of things (I mean, is there a worker around anywhere who does not hate his supervisor?) but the modality is all that has changed. We don't call it 'the Bell' any longer, now we call it 'SBC' and the bosses all use ugly computers to keep the workers on their toes. But same difference. PAT]