Reduction In Force

Firings. Like from a reality TV show.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Your company has performed horribly, and it needs to cut costs just to pay the interest on the debt it owes, so it must reduce its workforce, and it fires everyone not in a core position. What is “core”? Well, at Ford, the people who make the engines are core. The secretary to the person who lobbies the gov to say nice things about Ford cars...she’s not core. As the man said, “You’re fired.”

Reductions in Force happen when things go awry, and companies must scramble simply to pay the rent. Tough times, but welcome to the NFL. (Shareholders are No Friend to Labor. They just want good investment returns).

Reductions in Force happen for other reasons as well. Think: some natty combination of robots replacing union workers more efficiently, and/or the spread in costs between manufacturing your whoopee cushions in Chicago versus making them in Beijing. Have a big spread in costs? When the robots can do the job better, cheaper, faster than the humans, why wouldn't a company replace the union workers? At some point, some shark manager will ask why we are fighting this difficult fight. "Let’s move production overseas." And when that goes smoothly, the company usually induces a gigantic reduction in force, ending the jobs of some multiple thousand whoopee cushion makers, or WCMs, as they call them in the biz.

Work forces are obviously a heated topic among politicians, as most fired workers generally don’t vote for “more of the same.” Because we live in such a litigious society today, firing any individual worker could lead to an ugly lawsuit for a variety of reasons, as one of them might exist in one form or another as what is called a “protected class.” And those classes comprise subsets of gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, race, age, and myriad other classes, including, yes, mermaids.

So when a giant Reduction in Force happens, and essentially everyone in a group is fired, the risk of these kinds of lawsuits is dramatically mitigated. But it’s sad in any way, shape, or form. RIFs aren’t fun for anyone.

And, well, additionally, everyone really loved Martha the PR secretary, who had been at the company for 27 years, and never forgot a birthday. Unfortunately, the world got rough for Martha, and she had to go, too. At the end of the day, shareholders own the company, and it’s their call as to how they want it run.

There is no crying in baseball…but lots of crying when there’s a RIF.