Thursday, December 23, 2010
Ways to eliminate expensive IT workers...
For many employers, man hours per payroll dollar is considered more important than having experienced and dedicated people around...
It seems to be the goal ofleadershipmanagement in many industries to turn as many jobs as possible into commodity positions, in which workers can be fired with little recourse, outsourced easily, and for which there is a large labor pool. This is especially true for those corporations foolish enough to craft defined-benefit plans back in the days where outsourcing wasn't an option.
Below are a few approaches used by large enterprises in order to accomplish their goal:
| | View blog reactionsIt seems to be the goal of
Below are a few approaches used by large enterprises in order to accomplish their goal:
- Simply fire them. The courts have long ruled that employers may legally make layoff decisions based on salary; even if it causes a disparate impact on a particular age group (such as older workers).
- To discourage disabled workers, workers with medical conditions, etc, simply make working conditions physically rigorous. Virtually any facility has boxes that need to be moved, and other manual tasks--make that part of everybody's job description.
- Likewise, older workers should be discouraged--higher healthcare costs, and they are more likely to not buy the company line. Make it clear that age and/or experience doesn't get you a raise--however, raises for older workers can be advantageous because it gives you an excuse to fire them (see above).
- Have a family-unfriendly workplace. Families are bad things to allow employees to have. For one thing, families tend to object when workers donate countless hours of unpaid overtime to the company
- Create a Fear Culture and widely publish a termination quota. Make sure employees know that if they seek better working conditions they are sissies; if they don't pull their 70+ hours then they are stealing from the company.
- Unless looking for potential management material; try to find employees who aren't assertive. The type who got beaten up in high school are great candidates, they'll likely not object when asked to come in on Sundays, too.
- Craft schedules so every project is always behind. Crisis can be an excellent motivational tool; especially when you can point to the schedule and show the team that it's THEIR fault they are late, and THEIR responsibility to meet the artificial deadline.
- Have generous (on the surface) vacation packages to lure people in, but have a "use it or lose it" policy. Make sure that employees are so busy they can never use it, and must always lose it. Accrual of vacation is a bad thing--it's debt on your books, and employees might think they can save it up and cash it in at a higher rate of pay than when they earned it.
