Fired for Now: Getting fired, laid off, and hired again

You can’t finish up a year without 10-Best-Lists appearing everywhere, not to mention 10-Worst-Lists too. So it only figures that someone came up with the 10 Worst Employees of the Year. This one seems to have originated with CareerBuilder.com (10 Worst Employees 2008) and it’s proliferated like mosquitoes in a swamp across the media, both on and offline.

On the other hand, the list naming the 10 Worst Corporations of 2008 hardly made a dent in the media rounds. (10 Worst Corporations of 2008). Do we take more delight in the fall of the individual, more specifically, in ordinary … Continue Reading

I’m unemployed. My extended health care benefits run out at the end of the month, in exactly three days. I’m taking a short-term contract job in the new year that will offer zero benefits.

But if my health or the health of my family is threatened, I’ll be fine. We could develop a serious illness, have a major accident or just develop a  garden-variety sinus infection. Doesn’t matter. I and my family will get the health care we need, employed or not.

Why? Because I live in Canada.

And if I lived in any … Continue Reading

I wasn’t expecting to see a connection between the film Milk and today’s unemployment issues.

Milk, of course, is the newly-released film about the life and death of Harvey Milk, a supervisor for the city of San Francisco during the 70s and America’s first openly-gay elected official. He was one of the gay rights movements’ most prominent heroes, and Time Magazine included Milk in its list of the top 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

Yet Milk served in office for only 11 months before being assassinated along with San Francisco … Continue Reading

This morning I learned of another casualty in the firing wars.

In Vancouver yesterday, a 62-year-old man who had recently been let go returned to his place of work and opened fire at the company Christmas party. He shot and killed his former boss before surrendering to police.

This is the second time in just over two weeks that the firing of an employee has ended in death. The first was in Alaska where a recently-fired employee showed up at the hospital where he used to work and killed two former associates, including … Continue Reading

Just this week, a 48-year-old man who worked in the imaging department of a hospital outside Anchorage, Alaska walked into the hospital a day after being fired and shot his direct supervisor and another senior employee. One was killed, the other is still in critical condition. The man himself was shot dead at the scene by state police.

Most people don’t shoot their former bosses after being fired. It’s not a good career move.

But I think I know what that man was feeling, even though I don’t have any fantasies of picking up a rifle or hand-gun and heading back to … Continue Reading