Be careful

This exact thing happened at one place I worked years ago: the old plant manager retired so they sent out an interim manager from their home location states away from our facility.

Obviously she wanted to get back home so they made hiring a new plant manager a top priority. Eventually they found this guy who’d been like an assistant plant manager at some place that had closed down (maybe a red flag?!). So he got started and immediately, like within a month, started hiring on a bunch of his friends who’d lost their jobs at the old place when it shut down.

At first it was great because he was filling vacancies which made everyone’s load lighter. Then all the vacancies were filled but he still had more friends to bring in, so he started creating positions to bring in more people. Suddenly they were “coordinator” positions who basically only served as middlemen between other management, people who used to do their own work now had a staff of 2 or 3 people, etc.

Eventually even that bloated staff ran out of room for his old friends…and then all that staff started talking a toll on the budget…

…so over a few months they started mass layoffs of anyone who wasn’t part of the new plant manager’s circle of friends. Basically if you didn’t work with him before at the old place, weren’t part of the union, and weren’t part of his Thursday golf crew, you were sent packing. Over one week he got rid of like 30 people.

After I got it, I heard from friends that within a month they were mandating that any employee with specialized skills (read: I didn’t have any friends with that skill so we couldn’t get rid of you) had to take at least one weekend shift and pick up 8 extra hours through the week, every week, for minimum 56 hour weeks… because they no longer had the staffing to get it all done.