It’s never happened to me, but it’s pretty common. Just last week I heard of another person who lost her job because her department was restructured and thus her position eliminated.
Here’s how it went down: It’s an HR department that has consisted of one director and one admin assistant, both full time, and one student assistant, very part-time. The new structure adds an “assistant director” (not sure of the actual title), eliminates the full-time admin assistant, keeps the student assistant, and adds a part-time person just for payroll.
I don’t know if the rationale for the restructuring is supposed to be cost-saving, but adding people doesn’t seem a way to save money to me.
A year or so ago we knew someone else who lost his job through “restructuring.” Thing is, before too long that organization decided it might need to start looking for someone new whose job description would look remarkably like the one that had been eliminated. Sigh.
This practice seems less than honest to me. Why not work up the courage to tell someone the real reason you don’t want them around any more? And say it in a tactful, helpful way. Maybe because a person can’t be let go because, well, someone else just doesn’t like you. Or because you’re just not our kind of people.
The result is that the organization looks spineless and manipulative, and the person who loses his or her job gets screwed.
