Blackmail
Today is the first day of real winter here: the north wind seems to come straight down from the pole!
It wasn't a very good day at work... at 9:40 am we all got an e-mail from our CEO to announce redundancies, due to slow sales (of course he never mentioned the costs of opening a new office in India, which for a small-ish company like ours is considerable).
The e-mail informed us that the people whose "job was at risk" would have received an e-mail before 10 am.... so we all spent those 20 minutes in a kind of a worried trance!
Every time my PC beeped to signal a new e-mail, my heart missed a beat (I think my blood pressure went sky high).
I didn't get the e-mail so my job is safe for another little while...
The e-mail contained also the request to vote for a "pension contribution freeze" for the next 3 months. In a nutshell, it was "either you agree that we won't pay your company pension contributions for the next 3 months (and possibly the 3 months after that) or we may have to make some other people redundant".
Everybody is angry at the emotional blackmailing !! Plus there's no guarantee that we won't have any redundancies very soon...
As I have been through other 3 redundancy crises in the last few years with the same company, I do know that the management cannot be trusted, so I'm inclined to vote no and keep my pension contributions... but then the nice guy in me feels rather uncomfortable at the thought of someone else losing his job (the redundancy packages are the minimum allowed by law, so not much at all). Anyway I have time till Wed to decide.
It wasn't a very good day at work... at 9:40 am we all got an e-mail from our CEO to announce redundancies, due to slow sales (of course he never mentioned the costs of opening a new office in India, which for a small-ish company like ours is considerable).
The e-mail informed us that the people whose "job was at risk" would have received an e-mail before 10 am.... so we all spent those 20 minutes in a kind of a worried trance!
Every time my PC beeped to signal a new e-mail, my heart missed a beat (I think my blood pressure went sky high).
I didn't get the e-mail so my job is safe for another little while...
The e-mail contained also the request to vote for a "pension contribution freeze" for the next 3 months. In a nutshell, it was "either you agree that we won't pay your company pension contributions for the next 3 months (and possibly the 3 months after that) or we may have to make some other people redundant".
Everybody is angry at the emotional blackmailing !! Plus there's no guarantee that we won't have any redundancies very soon...
As I have been through other 3 redundancy crises in the last few years with the same company, I do know that the management cannot be trusted, so I'm inclined to vote no and keep my pension contributions... but then the nice guy in me feels rather uncomfortable at the thought of someone else losing his job (the redundancy packages are the minimum allowed by law, so not much at all). Anyway I have time till Wed to decide.