Am I Next?

Doing your job better than the next person won't save you if your salary is noticeably higher. These days, you'd be better off volunteering for a pay cut than upping your productivity, just to get the bean-counters' eyes off your number (mostly how they think of you anyway) and your name.

 

I've made the point before, but I'll make it again to be sure:

There is NO rhyme or reason to these layoffs. If you think higher salaries are the biggest target, then explain why it was part-timers and agate clerks who were laid off first from my old paper. If you think experience is the biggest target, then explain why the best photographer we had, a 26-year-old, was also one of those laid off. If you think talent will save you, explain why multiple Pulitzer winners are getting fired from the Tribune papers.

But hey, keep harping on the misguided theory that experienced, talented, high-salaried, high-profile employees are always the targets.

It's not true, Joe. This shit is affecting EVERYONE. And there's really no rhyme or reason to it. Nobody's "safe," and every paper's "targets" have been different.

 

Within the next year or two we're going to see what once were two-paper towns and are now one, will become no-newspaper towns----not counting your small-time players like alternatives and two-a-week community papers out in the subs. Even your web-based positions are no longer safe.

 

Excellent post. When guys like Scott Carter and Carter Gaddis and Bob Thomas are being let go, you know that talent has very little to do with who gets the axe.

 

Fine, Buck. I'm not interested in ranking who's more miserable and vulnerable than the next person. And you have attributed to me a word, an absolute -- ``always'' -- that I did not use. I'm just pointing out the lunacy of dumping people whom you (management) once thought were good enough to be rewarded with raises. If you dislike them now because they make more money than the norm, it's your (management's) fault, not theirs.

If forced to impose a system for shedding people, I maintain -- as a lot of unions do -- that shedding those who are the newest hires or who have the least experience at a shop or in a market at least would be more logical. Maybe less logical than kicking to the curb slackers of any age, any salary -- even though I hate seeing anyone lose a job they still want and earn on a daily basis.

A little disgusted, too, when a person's current role is used as justification for axing him/her. Let's see: The boss promotes someone from a college beat to national NFL writer, then tells the person, "We don't plan to have national writers anymore." Well, no shit, Sherlock, so why don't you let the person stay employed by going back ioto his/her college beat? Ditto for those who are assigned to a bureau, then get laid off rather than brought back into the home office (even as a less productive worker keeps his job).

Ultimately what I'm saying is, a process that maybe shouldn't be going on at all (buyouts/layoffs) and, if it is, ought to require surgical precision to shed the least productive, is instead being done as if monkeys are throwing darts at a dartboard.