Individual Contributors

Deep cuts into our workforce have left hardly anyone still standing in this division. Whole departments have vanished into thin air. The only way you'd even know anyone had been employed here is by looking at the piles of office desks and production workbenches stacked outside in the parking lot. Swing shift is like a ghost town now. There's only a handful of us in the buildings at night. Rumors have spread that this factory will be entirely shut down soon and for those of us still fortunate enough to have a job we will be relocated to another manufacturing site. Upper management hasn't given any details about our next round of layoffs but speculation is the axe will fall hard and the cuts will be much worse than before. This is the true face of offshoring.

We've seen most of our really troubled, poor performing employees kicked out in the first job cuts. That was actually a positive thing because dead weight coworkers held us back. Made the work environment fairly unpleasant at times. Things instantly ran smoother without employees like that mucking up the shop floor every day. I was happy to see pain in the ass people like that finally removed from the area. It was so long overdue. Now what is happening around here is highly skilled employees in critical positions are being tossed out. In many cases there are no replacements for them that have their level of expertise or knowledge in an aspect of our work. Managers hastily shift those responsibilities to other employees who are already overburdened. The expectation is for us to take crash training courses from disgruntled employees. You can't substitute 20 years worth of on the job experience with employees who have never transitioned into jobs like this on short notice. Only a few weeks to train and really understand what they are supposed to be doing isn't anywhere near enough of an effort to be successful.

Company infrastructure and manufacturing support is starting to break down.

Management has angered many of us by eliminating indispensable employees by the dozens and at the same time retain useless, deadbeat low level supervisors. I realize that for each nitwit manager they spare from the axe a few star performing employees could have stayed on with us. Managers are expensive. In comparison skilled production workers aren't. Once you're in the management club though you're almost guaranteed to be taken care of. The big dogs around here have shielded some supervisors from being cut by changing their job description. Instead of being a production line manager they now call them "Individual Contributors." It's a purely made up, abstract job title that means nothing.

Let's say you're a line supervisor and your entire department has been eliminated. You no longer have any employees that report directly to you, there is no manufacturing business for you to oversee anymore. You have no function here and for all reasonable purposes you should be let go. So, you are re-classified by your peers as an Individual Contributor and allowed to sit around all day doing zero. Every once in a while maybe another manager dumps some mundane busy work project or mindless task in your lap that nobody else on the management team wants to do. The rest is cake. You get to collect your pay and do practically nothing. It must be nice.