For many employers, manhours per payroll dollar is considered more important than having experienced and dedicated people around.  It seems to be the goal of management in many industries to turn as many jobs as possible into commodity positions, in which workers can be fired with little recourse, outsourced easily, and for which there is a large labor pool.

This is especially true for those corporations foolish enough to craft defined-benefit plans back in the days where outsourcing wasn't an option.

For such corporations, it hasn't gone noticed that certain classes of workers cost more (in terms of fewer hours worked and/or higher pay and benefits costs); thus here are suggestions of WaysToMakeExpensiveWorkersLeave.

Depending on where you live, many of these are illegal.  But many are also hard to prove, and the damages may simply be a cost of doing business.  

Many of these are collected from other pages.

* Simply fire them.  The courts have long ruled that employers may legally make layoff decisions based on salary; even if it causes a disparate impact on a particular age group (such as older workers). 

* To discourage disabled workers, workers with medical conditions, etc, simply make working conditions physically rigourous.  Virtually any facility has boxes that need to be moved, and other manual tasks--make that part of everybody's job description.  

* Likewise, older workers should be discouraged--higher healthcare costs, and they are more likely to not buy the company line.  Make it clear that age and/or experience doesn't get you a raise--however, raises for older workers can be advantageous because it gives you an excuse to fire them (see above).  

* Have a family-unfriendly workplace.  Families are bad things to allow employees to have.  For one thing, families tend to object when workers donate countless hours of unpaid overtime to the company.  For another, insuring families (UsaCulturalAssumption--employers, not the government, typically provide health insurance) can be considerably more expensive than insuring single employees.  Providing benefits like childcare and such is a BAD idea.  

* Create a FearCulture.  Use a TerminationQuota.  Make sure employees know that if they seek better working conditions they are sissies; if they don't pull their 70+ hours then they are StealingFromTheCompany.  

* Unless looking for potential management material; try to find employees who aren't assertive.  The type who got beaten up in high school are great candidates, they'll likely not object when asked to come in on Sundays, too.

* Craft schedules so every project is always behind.  Crisis can be an excellent motivational tool; especially when you can point to the schedule and show the team that it's THEIR fault they are late, and THEIR responsibility to meet the ArtificialDeadline.

* Have generous (on the surface) vacation packages to lure people in, but have a "use it or lose it" policy.  Make sure that employees are so busy they can never use it, and must always lose it.  Accrual of vacation is a bad thing--it's debt on your books, and employees might think they can save it up and cash it in at a higher rate of pay than when they earned it.

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It seems that global competition has changed companies. They are now leaner and Meaner, with a capital "M". They have no loyalty and do little to encourage loyalty. Maybe we have cheaper trinkets in the store because of all this, but it can make the quality of life stink. It is a good thing that globalization also makes Rolaids and Tums cheaper. The Northern European model is becoming more popular in the world than the US model because few want to trade peace of mind and general quality of life for cheap widgets.

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CategoryEvil