Slash and Burn Managers

and without paying attention to who does what.

They sacked my Dad from Serck because with his seniority he was on a high pay rate, but then they nearly had a riot on their hands because my Dad did the pay run, (in the 80s when they handed pay packets out in cash) He knew off by heart name and number or everyone in his division and had them paid and off home by 3pm on a Friday. Week after he left, his replacement still had people waiting for their wages at 7pm. They ended up having to employ three people to cover the work my father had done. Not such a saving.

It's amazing how many businesses don't look at replacement costs when making those decisions.

One place I worked at had the stats showing me doing four times the average work (and at a better quality), simply because I'd been there the longest and had the most tricks up my sleeve for getting things done. Replacing me would have cost four new salaries (probably totaling around 3x what I made, as I was on a senior grade), plus four times the tools and annual employee costs (probably the same again as the salary), plus four times the floorspace, plus four lots of training. If I'd been thinking, I would have run the numbers and asked for a six-fold pay increase in the month leading up to my departure. I probably would have stayed for even double what I was making. :)

About the only way to prevent short-term slash-and-burn tactics is to tie remuneration to long-term profitability. The only problem with that is that no senior manager wants their payout to be based on what their successor(s) might or might not do.

Not to mention that the companies which are slashed and burned themselves are apparently never hurt badly enough in the marketplace for other industry players to say "Whoa, hey, we better put some rules in against doing that here." Partly because there's always the chance that a company might need a slash-and-burn to survive at some point.

The problem is - if you're going to legislate, what exactly has to be legislated against and how will it be measured and enforced? Should you legislate against dumping more than a certain number of employees or a certain percentage (of the company or compared to the local economy) at once? What if it's the only way to save any jobs at all in a company?

Should companies over a certain size have a mandatory federally-administered fund to hedge against partial or total collapse? What about mid-sized companies which aren't technically the same entity but are extremely tightly bound, economically? Who'd make the judgment call and how would it be assessed?

Would it only apply to companies with, say, more than 100 employees (so that government officials wouldn't have to keep track of every Ma and Pa Kettle store)? What about companies which say "We're not going to fire many people because that would trigger the government thing, but as of tomorrow you're all getting a 95% pay cut"?

Should it apply if employees stage a mass walkout/quit? (Kind of a M.A.D. situation there.)

How could a solution (of whichever kind) be sold politically, given that any such solution would appear to restrict how big business operates in much of the USA at the moment?

Referred to as 'chainsaw managers' in Australia.