Yep. It does. Lots of people are losing their jobs even when they’ve worked for companies a long time. Here where I work during the day, we’ve been through three rounds of reductions starting back last November or so. The first time it happened, the company could say we reduced some of the lower performing and new people (although I knew some who were neither).

The next time, since they’d spent so much time talking about how everyone left was a core employee and vital to the organization, they couldn’t blame it on performance - it was really the economy - it was for the first round too, but they wanted an excuse, I guess. I blogged about that one. 

The third time it happened - just recently, we lost about another tenth of the employees. Some of them had been with the company for a long time - decades. One, a good man and a dedicated employee, had reached his 25th service anniversary just months before. That’s almost unheard of these days - 25 years at one company - really old school. Another, who had started a few months before I did twenty years ago was also let go. Both of us were from Nashvile, were both Vietnam era veterans, but had not gotten to know each other until we met in the break room on the 97th floor of the World Trade Center over twenty years ago.

So when I hear about an employee with twenty years of service (like me at my company or my friends who had been here even longer), who does something for which any decent employer would fire them in a heartbeat, but gets a “pass reprimand” because she’s never done anything flagrant before and “has been there for twenty years,” it’s like spitting on those people who got released without any reason, but just because of the economy hard to understand at some levels

Now how strange is that? When there’s cause, you stay and when there isn’t, you go. Sorry, but that’s just wrong different.

Update:  I read ACK’s piece last night. He’s right that Ms. Goforth is not a player. She doesn’t even play one on TV. She’s just a regular person working in a job that doesn’t pay any where near what it would in business. Every company is different. Here, such an action wouldn’t have been tolerated at all. The state, however, isn’t likely to lose clients over this. And, as R. Neal said, this could become a teaching moment for not only her but others. That’s a good thing. Sherri, don’t do that again (but you probably already know that, don’t you?). Making people afraid is never a good thing. It’s time to move on.