Kansas City Star's bizarre approach to a staff reduction

Definitely. I have a friend from college who was diagnosed with breast cancer around the holidays a few years back, then that spring was told she was not going to be retained as a schoolteacher. It was completely budgetary, and with the teachers union in her district, it was a cut-and-dried decision. But here was a divorced woman with two kids, going through horrific cancer treatment, and being laid off from her job.

It sucks, it's horrible and it makes you want to blow things up. But it happens.

 

Someone is going to lose their job over this and I have a feeling it may not just be one of the reporters.
How many missteps does a guy like Fannin get?

 

My wife was pregnant when I got the boot... A thousand people have similar stories... There's never a good time to lose your job.

 

People have mentioned the situations where an older employee is approached about a buyout. To me that is a totally different situation. If I read this correctly, the woman making the decision has a child in high school who is presumably going off to college in the near future. It would be crazy to expect someone to walk away from a job like that. The people I've seen approached about the "choice" are all people who are pretty close to retirement age anyway, and in some cases they actually do feel like they're close enough financially and they don't want to put up with the crap anymore and they can do someone a solid.

I only know of Fannin what I've read here and heard elsewhere in the industry, but if he signed off on this he has an unredeemable moral failing about people.

 

Mike Fannin . . . the flames of discontent.

 

Know what it takes to be "good" management? You need to me a total fucking yes-man. Don't question what corporate tells you to do but question everything your staff does. They don't want innovators, they want people who won't rock the boat.

 

The only qualification I would add here is that these stories tend to go viral, and someone who publicly falls on the sword to save someone else's job MAY become a quasi-celebrity whose name is known all over and who, suddenly, becomes a good PR hire for some other place ("We hired the person who selflessly gave up her job . . . ").

If that happens --- a big if, I know --- you're out of this horrible business, you aren't worried about another whacking coming down the pike in a few months, you no longer work for a company that would put you in such a situation, you don't have survivor's guilt for causing someone to lose their job . . . and you've done something to be proud of.

Given all that, it might not be quite so crazy to walk away.

 

But yet they want all their reporters to be boat rockers. Oh the irony. :-\

 

That's it right there. No questioning authority inside the building.

No wonder everything is fucked up. Good ideas used to be encouraged.

 

The catch phrase in my old shop was "watch dogs." "We need watch dogs. We want you to be watch dogs. You have to be a watch dog." When the company was threatening Chapter 11 and I heard there was a corporate jet I asked, "So who is watching dogging them?"

Needless to say i wasn't there much longer, and I just feel awful about that.

 

If the reporters cut the brakes on his car, and he went off a cliff if a jury would convict?