Is Your Job Your Life and Everything in Pakistan?

I got laid off yesterday from a job I really liked, for people I really liked. Just a reminder that you’re disposable as soon as they decide you are. Stop working late. Stop reading emails after hours. Stop working on weekends. A job is income to live your life, not your life.

Capitalists: We’re going to minimize pay while maximizing profits.

Workers: Okay, well, we’ll minimize labor while just barely keeping our jobs.

Capitalists: BUT WORK ETHIC

So true, a lady I worked with actually got hit by a car and died. This was on a weekend. On Monday morning, her name was not mentioned in the morning meeting at all. Within a few days, a few staff shared her job. To this day, ….Can’t go on, too emotional now. Life is too short for adding unnecessary stresses to our lives. Enough about you. Why do you think you got laid off if you are a valuable asset to the company? Let’s discuss that first before you rant from your hurt feeling. Employers don’t fire their best employees. Good employees are hard to come by in the current market condition.

My and my co-worker’s positions were just eliminated because of a power struggle. Only thing we did wrong was to ask for a release schedule and publicly (after multiple attempts to do it privately) point out that products were behind. I mean instead of asking the product team directly for the schedule, (which we and our then manager had done multiple times) we asked in a meeting with other company stakeholders present. Suddenly we got it.

By only doing the bare minimum required for your job, you are just making yourself disposable a lot faster. Literally not how that works unless you’re in an extremely high position from the beginning of your career which almost never happens. My dad worked too hard and go laid off because they couldn’t afford to pay him anymore. That is “literally” how it works. He didn’t say working hard won’t get you laid off, shit can happen to anyone. He was saying that doing the bare minimum will make you a bigger target for it. That’s just facts.

It wont though, you don’t get paid more for doing the bare minimum, a company won’t keep you around based on how loyal you are, its based on how much money you make them. Doing the bare minimum means they have to pay you the bare minimum for your position, you do your job. I have to respectfully disagree here. I used to work with someone who did the bare minimum and wound up losing her job over something else. My mother was a school nurse, very rarely took days off. Her plan was to retire in June ‘93. In August ‘92 she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She worked in between treatments. She was buried the day she was supposed to retire. Company absorbed the retirement $$ cuz she was an active employee.

Business management professor told us if we get overwhelmed or sucked into an abyss on the job, walk outside. If your name isn’t on the building, stop working as if you own the company. Give your best for 8 hrs and don’t take the stress home with you. I once had an incredibly stressful job, and my mantra was “I don’t get paid enough to stress”. It helped me enormously. I dealt with things, did my best, but was able to keep calm and not let stress get to me at all. I really enjoyed it because of that.