Nope. The same happened In Austria with our ex-state owned telecommunication business; because it was state owned before privatization, they had quite a lot of nearly unfireable workers outside of extreme circumstances - state businesses often used “pragmatization” to secure people they thought weren’t replaceable and to provide those people with security with a bit of a lower pay grade (at least it started that way - later on this system was ripe with corruption, using “pragmatization” as a bonus for people who were loyal to whomever).
Those workers often had pretty high salaries in comparison to the newly arriving employees, accumulating pay raises for the last 20-30 years. And they didn’t want to leave their jobs, because many knew that their skillset was severely outdated and they would struggle to get another job at 50 years of age. The new owners had no use for them because they simply were too expensive and the large amount of unfireable personell dragged stock prices down.
So these workers had to come in every workday, just to sit in an nearly empty room for 8 hours - no work, no entertainment, nothing. Even the most lethargic person gets depression, anxiety and desperation after a few years of that. If you stopped coming in, they actually had leverage to get rid of you. If you called in sick, i heard of quite a lot of cases where they tried to make sure that they really were sick, because if not, it would be a fireable offense.
One of my uncles was one of the people just sitting in the “Pool”, as it was called. He was NOT happy, but he was one of the few people who actually still had some useful skills even in a modernized telecom company, and later on was able to at least get assigned some normal work, but most people who were sitting in the “pool” surrendered sooner or later when getting offered a golden handshake.
There are things like this in the USA, too, usually for people who have contracts that make them unfirable, but still fuck up something huge at work. Most famous example is probably the NYC Dep’t of Education “Rubber Rooms” that they euphemistically call “Reassignment Centers.”
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 2 months ago
Nope. The same happened In Austria with our ex-state owned telecommunication business; because it was state owned before privatization, they had quite a lot of nearly unfireable workers outside of extreme circumstances - state businesses often used “pragmatization” to secure people they thought weren’t replaceable and to provide those people with security with a bit of a lower pay grade (at least it started that way - later on this system was ripe with corruption, using “pragmatization” as a bonus for people who were loyal to whomever).
Those workers often had pretty high salaries in comparison to the newly arriving employees, accumulating pay raises for the last 20-30 years. And they didn’t want to leave their jobs, because many knew that their skillset was severely outdated and they would struggle to get another job at 50 years of age. The new owners had no use for them because they simply were too expensive and the large amount of unfireable personell dragged stock prices down.
So these workers had to come in every workday, just to sit in an nearly empty room for 8 hours - no work, no entertainment, nothing. Even the most lethargic person gets depression, anxiety and desperation after a few years of that. If you stopped coming in, they actually had leverage to get rid of you. If you called in sick, i heard of quite a lot of cases where they tried to make sure that they really were sick, because if not, it would be a fireable offense.
One of my uncles was one of the people just sitting in the “Pool”, as it was called. He was NOT happy, but he was one of the few people who actually still had some useful skills even in a modernized telecom company, and later on was able to at least get assigned some normal work, but most people who were sitting in the “pool” surrendered sooner or later when getting offered a golden handshake.
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 2 months ago
There are things like this in the USA, too, usually for people who have contracts that make them unfirable, but still fuck up something huge at work. Most famous example is probably the NYC Dep’t of Education “Rubber Rooms” that they euphemistically call “Reassignment Centers.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassignment_center
atro_city@fedia.io 2 months ago
In the land of Hitler, I'm not surprised.