Scary Thought!

Here's a little exercise for you to see just how exposed you and your family are to the whims of your employer's senior management.

• Go through your checkbook for the last month and add up every fixed obligation you paid like mortgage or rent, car payments, credit card bills, tuition payments and the like.
• Then add up what you spent on food
• How much did you spend on imbedded annual expenses like insurances (all of them!), utilities, etc.
• Add up the paychecks that you deposited in your account.
• Is there a positive balance? I hope so, but likely not.
• Now go to your employee handbook and look up their severance plan (sometimes called a separation plan).
• How many weeks of benefit are you eligible for?
• Do you think you could find a job in that period?
• If not, YOU ARE IN TROUBLE.
• No more paychecks/benefit checks.
• The bills keep coming
• You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know what starts to happen next.

Is there a system or product or service or strategy that could help you? I believe so.

Collective Advocacy

Collective Advocacy = Collective Wisdom

My mind is wandering...collective advocacy, collective wisdom, collective bargaining, mutual benefit. Remember, we are talking about service severance. What is the best approach to supporting displaced workers? Is there a way to harness the collective horsepower of the unemployed?

Is there something to be learned from the mutual insurance company approach, i.e., the policyholders are the stockholders. They have a stake in the product delivered and the success of it.

If employers are looking at us as expendible currency, then what's wrong with involving ourselves in the underlying value of that currency. It would seem to me that collectively we have a lot more to gain than trying to go it alone.

Do me a favor and think on this for a couple of days while I go out on a contract job and try to put a few bucks in my pocket.

willy

Turning the Tables

How could the system possibly be turned to your advantage? Right now, you sit down, go on-line, read the newspapers' classified, go to industry publications specific to your training and identify possible advertised job opportunities and network as best you can. Then you either e-mail or mail your resume to companies that are trolling or you think are trolling for a certain skill that you could provide.

The Monster's of the world try to help you out and let you post your resume on their site, so that hiring companies can punch in a few key words and if you're lucky enough to have one of them in your resume, you might make it through to where someone actually reads your resume. Again, kind of like buying a lottery ticket.

Maybe the old concept of employment company isn't so broken. Outdated, certainly...but not broken. What is missing from my point of view is real accountability and advocacy. Do you suppose there's a chance something like that could be created using the power of the internet?
Maybe it's a hybrid high tech/low tech kind of business model.

I've got some ideas along those lines. Think "collective advocacy".

More later.

willy

Service Severance

Service severance...what do you suppose that really means? In my world that means benefits that you would receive after you have been fired...not in lieu of cash benefits but IN ADDITION TO cash benefits. Service severance benefits (and I strongly differentiate these from outplacement) have to be accountable, ie. the provider doesn't get paid unless there is a result that directly benefits YOU, e.g. you receive training or you find a new job. But what could some of those benefits be? The obvious one is training. But training just to learn a new skill does not necessarily lead to a new job. Targeted training leads to a new job. Another benfit could be assistance in identifying the job market. I don't mean going to monster.com and plugging in your resume. That doesn't identify the active job markets. It just trolls your resume through the electronic universe. In my book, kind of like buying a lottery ticket, especially when you realize how many job boards are out there and how many of those are specialized, so that a generalist board may not even be sourced by a company looking for a specific skill. Remember! Companies hire skills and fire people. When you're looking for a job, you are selling your skills!

Do you suppose there's a way to turn the tables on your looking for a job?

We'll talk in the morning.

willy

Cash Severance

Cash severance. What are the options?

• All at once...lump sum?
• Same as paycheck before you got fired...for as long as it lasts?
• Spread out over a period of time that you determine...so that you know you have cash to pay your bills?
• Paid directly to a training program/university, so you can upgrade your skills?
• Paid directly to your mortgage, credit card, tuition payments, car payments, child support?

These are the ones I can think of right off the top of my head. How say you?

willy

Cash Severance vs. Service Severance vs. Both

Let's assume that the New Severance should include cash and include services designed to help you find a new job. How should the cash benefit be structured? Lump sum? Paid out over time? Should that time be based on some specific formula, or should you be able to determine it? Should it be directed towards paying for new training? Should you have the ability to pre-fund your severance account? Are there any "tax smart" approached to paying out/receiving severance?

And then what about the services provided by the New Severance? What could a company possibly do or pay to have done that would provide the greatest benefit to those people it just fired.

Think about it. We'll talk tomorrow.

willy

More than Money

That perfect world scenario I talked about yesterday...We should define it, promote it, insist that it become the "gold standard". It should be based on the need for "New Severance" to include more than money and virtually meaningless outplacement services.

What do you suppose "New Severance" should include?

willy