Human Resource thought….fire to retire?
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt
Human Resources: Coincidence or Trend
I have been around a long time, and have worked with and taught many people, so I get calls from people on career and workplace advice (I also have done expert witness work on certain aspects of employment practices).
In the past two weeks I have received 4 contacts from people 55 – 64 years old wondering about being “reorganized” (gracefully fired) from their managerial jobs.
Now I am certain people in that age group are having trouble being hired, but I wonder if fire-to-retire is going to become more common place. Bad economy paranoia? Smart intuition?
Coincidences or trends. Any thoughts out there?
i believe ‘pancaking’ is the trend. i’ve been looking around the past year and it’s a very common theme with many of the companies i’ve talked to and with owners that i know. of course they’ll never say you’re too old and i won’t go back to an “institutional” environment.
Scuttlebutt about DoD looking at “buy-outs” and related early retirement incentives.
I took one in 2003!!!
Never looked back, the boss and slope down which the defense acquisition business has gone helped me leave with a smirk.
A psychological experiment. Imagine yourself a mid or high level manager, with the power to fire or promote people. You have two types of subordinates: those younger than you, and those older. Assume relatively equal capabilities, likeability, determination, all the other virtues. The younger people, however, are cheaper to employ from the standpoint of salary and health care and other benefits; some of them may be expected to rise above their current position as they mature. The older folks… with more time spent on the job than you, they’ve pretty well demonstrated that they’ve hit the limits of what might be expected of them. After all, they are older, and they have positions below your level, so their incapability of improvement is obvious. So now you have to let
people go. Whom do you pick?
In a crunch, whom do you fire?
I understand that, just looking for any evidence of a trend.
I suspect the trend is there. A breakdown of long-term unemployment by age seems likely to show it–though it has the problem of people who are NILF not being counted.
Difficult to document, of course; otherwise, we would be admitting that age discrimination is prevalent in American society, not just in the Law profession.
I’ve been seeing this trend for well over a decade. [Former career in municipal government, now working in academia] I got out on my own terms in ’01 (before the downturn and all the major waves of downsizing, and couldn’t be happier. All of the above commenters are correct, of course.
mike shupp
maybe, but i wouldn’t take the fact that “they have positions below your level” as evidence of “incapability of improvement.” or even need for improvement.
and may i say… from my position below your level… that i have been saying for years that “raising the retirement age” is not going to be a very smart answer to the phony crisis in Social Security.
on the other hand i heard just last week about a high level person in a private corporation retiring at the age of 62 because he couldn’t stand the nonsense any longer.
The hilarious thing to me is the way my employer (fortune 500 tech firm) purges the “deadwood” in periodic spasms then realizes how much we need their experience and knowledge, end up bringing them back as consultants at an hourly rate 2-3X their salaries. Geniuses.
There has been significant thinning of people my age and experience level in the 15 years I’ve been here. Not exactly surprising they want cheaper bodies with newer educations. But I can’t help noticing how many of them spend half their time twittering/facebooking etc instead of actually solving problems.
Obviously there are exceptions to both rules – I’ve seen my share of 50something “no-ops” who are just waiting to retire and have been lucky to work with some young go-getters who actually make huge contributions. But they do seem to be exceptions on both ends.
There is nothing new here. I’ve seen some of this my entire life. It may be accelerating. Sometimes it is the case that the manager is burnt out but cannot see it. But most of time that I have seen it a change has occurred. Reorg is one change; new high level management is another; new mid level management is a frequent cause. With the latter (the one I have seen most often) a new mid level manager comes in wanting to impress the upper management, determines which lower managers he can “work with” and which he can’t. After six months or so he reorganizes. The “not wanted” lower management is moved to “special assignment” without supervisory responsibilites. The vital sidelined ones immediately leave for another position (usually called an “offer”) and the others rot in “special assignment” until someone offers an incentive to ease them out the door. (A few rot for awhile and find a way to remake themselves as a vital part of the workforce, admittedly.)
Now that is the one I have witnessed most often and I have made it too simple. I have mixed feelings about it all. I recognize the benefit of investing in younger blood in many situations. (Think of the return on the investment.) In my lifetime, for example, physical science has gone from an environmental/analytic emphasis to a molecular biology/bio-analytics emphasis. Many in the older workforce may have made manager in the former days but struggle with leading the latter.
I focused on managers because that was the orignal description.
Anna Lee
I’d add to your history that from where I watched this sort of thing transpire there is no evidence that actual ability to do the work has anything to do with the changes. Being “the right sort of person” helps enormously. Getting on the bad side of your boss can get you sat in the corner.
Maybe it’s different is a fast moving high tech business… but somehow i’d bet that people are not really any different wherever they work. I suspect the decline of empires is caused by something like this.
There is no reason, I think,not to hire those kids with new educations.. but what i have seen happen is that they get hired in at a higher salary, not lower, while the old timers have already gotten their last raise, so I don’t think the pay differential turns out to be a big factor.
In any case, if the old people can’t do the work, and don’t want to do the work, but have paid for their retirement, where is the logic in raising the retirement age?
My general impression is that many people are psychologically disturbed by being in authority over people old enough to be their parents. It can lead to unfair treatment at a job, usually rationalized as “just deserts” for the older person’s faults. There may be more of this going around today, but I suspect I could find Biblical examples if I were so inclined… Noah’s treatment by his children after the Ark settled?
mike
wow. i’d have to think about Noah. I think there is some basis for the idea that older workers are “not as productive”… but only some. There is a certain nastiness that affects a lot of “bosses,” and getting even with dad seems to be only one form it takes.
NOte, not all bosses are nasty… but it seems to be a common enough human experience that given a little power, and maybe not enough competence-in-the-use-of-power people behave badly, or their normal human errors show up in the form of injustice and, well, stupidity.
i doubt i could say anything very useful on this subject. just to try to point out that the kinds of problems related to older people in the work place are not new, and very much a part of all the human interaction problems that make life so unreasonably hard at times.