The recession can bite me.
(While in HK, we took the ferry over to Cheung Chau (about an hour), which is a little island that is home to the only olympic medal winner from HK - she won a gold for windsurfing in 1996)
Our provincial government is projected to have a massive deficit - so finally yesterday, the agency announced that they'll be doing lay-offs.
So far, it's only 18 people - half from the union, half not. Supposedly, it's mostly made up of people who are not in core services (ie: workers who don't go out and meet with clients), but pretty much anything can happen. Needless to say, people are panicking - the firing from the union side is going to be based upon senority, not how good you are at your job. Lots of people have only worked at the agency for a year or so.. which makes it hard to say who's really on the chopping block.
They've said that they're not going to fire contract staff (myself) but if they fire a Supervisor, and the Supervisor decides to go for a demotion and go back to frontline, then they will have to fire contract staff to make way for them. Problem for the Supervisor is if they choose to do that, they will begin with no senority, making them ranked lower than people they had been previously supervising.. which also means if the agency decides to do ANOTHER round of lay-offs, they'd be cut first.
The environment is absolutely toxic at the agency today. No one's really there - most are sick or working from home. Of course people are scared about what will happen, which makes doing any work absolutely impossible. People are supposed to be informed by Tuesday, so things are supposed to continue as normal. But really, unless you're doing visits or something, it's really hard to focus on paperwork if you think you're going to get fired. I'm way overtime for the week, so I just took the afternoon off to stay home.
I swear, maybe I should go into a different line of work. If I get laid-off, that's like the 2nd time in a year I've gotten fired for the exact same reason. And it's not like there's a plentiful outpouring of jobs waiting for me. I'm already working for the best employer within the field - it's basically a government job, is in an area that is always funded (child welfare) and pretty much NEVER fires people since people quit from stress instead. Yet again, here we are.
I. AM. SO. SICK. AND. TIRED. OF. THIS. BULLSHIT.
So yeah. Stressssssssssssssssssssss, wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.