The Unemployed Life

The Layoff Secret-Keeper

When I got The List, I felt physically ill. I had to force myself to read it, and when I had to refer to it I kept it face down on my desk in case someone walked in. At night I locked it up. No one asked me to, but I did so anyway. Because no one should learn they are going to be fired by happening to glance at a one-page document on my desk.

This summer, the company where I work underwent a restructuring, shutting down the riskiest of our major product lines. As a result, a lot of people lost their jobs. Most of them had been here for years—some since the company’s formation decades ago. Because of my role handling the company’s litigation, I was one of the small circle outside of HR that had The List weeks before the terminations happened: A list with names, departments, severance. They were long weeks.

The Onus of Insight

I’m very good at keeping secrets, whether juicy or dry. It is part of my job and my disposition. I’m also not much of a gossip hound, which helps. I really don’t want to know my colleagues’ secrets. I have to work with them, after all, and I really don’t want to be distracted by someone’s affair with the guy from IT when we’re discussing the correct application of GAAP– it’s hard enough to stay focused on the fair value accounting rules for derivative instruments. The human brain was not designed to handle sex and accounting at the same time.

Are you on the layoff list? This checklist will help you spot telltale signs.

The hardest thing about having a job these days is the uncertainty of whether or not you will still have it a year from now—or indeed whether the company will even exist by then. But living with The List made me appreciate how tough it is on the people who have to hand out the layoffs. Just knowing who it has been written must go, and soon, took it out of me.

They had distributed a copy of the heavily passworded List to me so that I could determine which of the departing employees had documents we needed to safeguard for litigation purposes. For those lucky few, the departure would be marked by the IT department swooping in and copying all their hard drives.

Mingling with Co-workers

The three weeks after The List landed weren’t easy. All around me stalked individuals from The List. It was hard to keep a normal appearance, to engage someone in elevator chit-chat (I hear it’s supposed to be sunny! Have a good weekend!) or stand in the kitchen silently waiting for my coffee while the people around me traded the latest hot—and usually inaccurate—rumors about What Will Happen. And there I stood by, knowing more about their professional fate than they did—what their severance package would be, when they would be leaving our office.

I know—poor me, having to wait it out until other people got fired. Warning them was not an option; not only would it have been a violation of my professional obligations as in-house counsel, but it would also have been just plain weird. Imagine what it would be like to have a colleague sidle up to you and tell you that because of the company’s litigation hold practices she had the inside line on your life. After all, how those “left behind” in the workforce handle the layoffs of those around them can make a difference. Not in the big sense, of course, but in the small moments, of being treated with respect, recognized as a professional and having years of hard work recognized. Which is why I said hello in the elevator and didn’t shy away from the kitchen. Just because someone will leave soon does not make them less of a colleague right now. It is also why I didn’t talk about my knowledge with anyone, even those whom I knew also had The List.

Signs of Compassion

And what impressed me, especially as this was the first time I went through something like this, was how similarly everyone else in the small circle of people who had The List reacted. There were no winks, mysterious hints or unnecessary references. After all of the horrible layoff stories making the round of the Internet, it was nice to see how professionals handled the real thing. Even if it did make us feel ill.

The circle is coming back around, by the way; another round of layoffs is imminent, and I’m pretty sure that this time, my name is on The List.

Tags: employers, layoffs, still working