GM offers buyouts to 'majority' of U.S. salaried workers
GM expects to take a pretax charge of up to $1.5 billion related to the buyouts, according to a public filing Thursday by the company.
In my long and storied work career I experienced at least a score of layoffs. All were painful, not only to those directly impacted, but also to those who remained, who had to work harder and for at least a time, were working under a cloud. You never know if there is another layoff around the corner.
But the one lesson that I extracted from those experiences is this: Large organizations are incredibly fat. In every single case, the work continued to get done, without the departed peers. Sometimes their work was spread around to other, but the surprising thing was that "we" discovered that a lot of their work (those who were let go) was not necessary.
My direct boss was laid off one time when I was working for en engineering company. He main function was to manage the preparation of some huge monthly productivity report. The day he left we discussed the report and couldn't find a single person who valued the report. We just dropped and never heard a single complaint.
Now General Motors is offering a buyout to half of their salaried employees.
As a "car guy" the most profound questions that pops into my head are these: If those people are expendable,(a) why are they still employed? (b) What are they doing? (c) Who will perform those functions after they accept the buyouts?
This same question comes up in a number of contexts. Google is laying off thousands; Twitter the same; others the same. And people fret that these organizations will implode. They needn't worry. It never happens.
In the public sector, how many times have you heard officials explain why, for example, the staffing levels of schools can NEVER be reduced, even though the number of students has dropped by fifty percent? Or when ANY staffing cuts are raised we, the taxpaying public, are told that major functions MUST be cut back...there is no way around it. Hogwash. It happens all the time in the private sector, and the work gets done.
