The Squeeze 2

To keep out unions, this company has an employee profit-sharing plan: "We are all owners."

It's a good plan, actually, despite its cynically-derived origins back in the 1970s when everyone was afraid of a La Raza-type organization of ethnic workers who have always made up the majority of the production floor here. (Hazy memories on exact dates, since no one is around who was there back then.) The plan is good because the company was small enough for the longest time that it was more of an extended family than an Us-Them division of labor. Yeah, there were family squabbles, but everyone was babysitting every else's kid, too. Literally. First name basis, bottom-up, top-down. Couple of idiot children, a couple of enfants terrible, quite a few raised-by-merit bastards. Democratic in its own rough tumble way. So when the employee profit-sharing plan began, and began to flourish after years of the company languishing in a hole, it was a just reward to everyone for pulling together.

Now we're sorta big, though. Not multi-national big, not even a couple of thousand big, but a healthy high hundreds number nevertheless. The Originals are almost all gone, at every level. But the profit sharing plan continues - because the Corporates in charge now revised the plan slightly to change across-the-board sharing into a "graduated merit" plan.

Read: The higher you are, the more you get.

OK, so it's Real World now. It's still a good plan, as these things go. Quarterly, plus an annual dividend, and it gives us an incentive not to make major screw-ups that cause the plan to shrink. (Major screw-up #1: Send out a $100,000 order to the wrong side of the country: lose the order AND lose the client. It has happened.)

But - with the Real World realities come some Real world hypocrisies. We've got a plan without the participation anymore. Never more apparent than yesterday, when 49 people were laid off - including one with 27 years' service - while the Prez gave a speech about how "We have to protect the profit sharing for those who are still here." Yep, we are running tight these days, caught in The Squeeze: 'just not discussing options in a "share" mode -- like unions might have demanded.

Like the old Guns and Roses song used to ask in a basso profundo whisper while Axel Rose squealed his falsetto:
Where do we go from here?
Where do we go?
Where do we go?
Where do we go from here?