The company I work for has been in bankruptcy since January 2002. I will refrain from naming it specifically, but will hint that it is a telecom and it is not WorldCom/MCI...
About three months before they announced the bankruptcy they RIF'd a couple thousand employees, including several from my department. About two months after the bankruptcy filling, they RIF'd a couple more thousand employees (one of which was my fiancee), and asked for several voluntary RIFs as well (people who would take their leave of the company at will and receive their entire severance package up front instead over so many weeks/months for the unvoluntary RIFs). I think my department lost about 25%-30% of its staff.
Then the company went through a period where it felt safe to hire some more people. My department hired seven people, a few of who had taken the voluntary RIF earlier that year. However, this was simply a trade-off because we had "acquired" a department that used to be based out of NYC, and it needed to be staffed by seven employees out of our department now that it was going to be in Phoenix. None of the new hires was my fiancee.
Now, the company is suffering again and has had to RIF some more people. I heard today through a colleague that our department lost three people (one of them was one who'd been hired last summer). I am keeping my fingers crossed that they are done taking away from our department as we're stretched pretty thin as it is. We're a 24/7 operations, and our workload requires, at the very least, four or five people at night, and about three times that during the day. We lost one person from the day shift, and one person from the swing shift (first half of the week). The third person was from another branch of our department that works along with us but does not do the same type of work our group does.
Two of the three people who were RIF'd, I feel were justified choices. The third person, in my opinion, was a poor choice. I won't go into details, but I think it was rather cruel to have chosen that third person over several others who would have been better choices.
I certainly hope they are done RIF'ing from our department. I would hate to go back to work Thursday after my four day weekend and discover they have some more people to pick off and find myself in their number. :o(
That's all, folks...
