Rumours

There's a rumour going around at the office where I work that the company is going to substantially change the division of which we're a part. At its most minor, certain people would be given the opportunity to retire early; at its most drastic, it would be involve selling the entire division to a different company. The goal is money. We have sold entire divisions before, with that motivation, but at the moment, the guessing is that the former is more likely than the latter.

What I found interesting, and hardly surprising, is that everyone involved in the discussion assumes that there will be little, if any, attention paid to the people involved -- to 'doing the right thing by them' -- no matter which option is chosen. The assumption is that if people are given the opportunity to retire, they should grab it and run, because the next step might be to say '...and all you other guys just took a twenty percent cut in pay', or something similar. That this would gut the organization of experienced talent would not matter to the people making the decision, because it'd be entirely based on finances. People simply don't trust the people running the organization to look out for them, which is unfortunate, anyway, and particularly so in a company which officially prides itself in its sensitivity to the worker bee.