Not funny “ha ha”
The vast majority of reactions to this little ATIAC have been (to paraphrase) “Oh my god that’s so sad.”
And duh. It’s not funny, except for maybe the little OWS joke tacked on near the end. What it is, however, is factual.
I got laid off from my printing job at BMO Harris bank in 2008, after a year and a half of working as a ‘permanent temp’. I will give you a moment to absorb that oxymoron. Basically, that meant that I worked full-time, including overtime, but would not receive benefits, and the temp agency kept the $2/hr extra that I would have made were I an ‘actual’ BMO Harris employee. In those 18 months there were two rounds of layoffs, as this was during the 2007 financial crisis (that is now totally over and everyone has jobs again, thanks be to Jesus). The first round was mid-level financial people, the second was about 60% of the administrative staff. The third, which is when they finally decided that even the temps they hired to replace whoever they fired in the round of layoffs that allowed me to work there in the first place, also took with it another couple thousand mid-level financial folks, including the 55 year old lady from the 19th floor who had been working for the company since 1984.
What’s that, four years from retirement? After 25 years of consistent work? And Jesus fucking Christ was she nice. Kind of a round, beaming black lady with this voice like warm maple syrup that would call everyone ‘sunshine’ like that was your name, little crinkles at the corners of her eyes that matched the lines around her mouth from smiling all the time, who never once complained about anything and always said thank you when you finished a job for her. We’ll call her Rosemary because that was her name. 25 fucking years with the same bank, and right after Thanksgiving they cut her loose. She came around to say goodbye to all of us, even me, who had only been there for 18 months out of her 300, and she was crying like someone snapped the faucet handle off inside her eyes.
And I’m not trying to downplay how bad it must have been for the other 30,000 people they let go during my tenure there, but her in particular … Well, it pissed me off and it made me sad in a way I’m not really capable of expressing properly. You work 45 hours a week around investment bankers and someone calling you Sunshine every time they see you is like getting a back massage. You need those kinds of people in a job like that.
Two weeks later they fired me too. Never missed a day of work. Worked an average of 20 hours of overtime per month. They didn’t have to pay for my benefits. “It’s nothing personal,” my manager said, just like Rosemary’s manager no doubt told her. “It’s Christmas,” I said. “I don’t have any money saved. Why didn’t you give me any warning?”
No answer, just a sad little head shake. “Please don’t make this difficult.”
You know what they were doing when we all got let go? Even the lady that had been there since I was five?
Hiring three Bank of America bigwigs that had become free agents in the aftermath of the whole ‘destruction of the economy’ thing. “We’re so hurt by this collapsing housing bubble that we can no longer afford the services of our hardworking staff, but …”
Cut out a couple thousand $30K a year jobs across the board and you can afford to hire a few $500K a year guys with no problem. Who cares if they’re responsible for the entire shitshow?
So I tried to make it a little more ‘current’ with the tent jab, but that panda is for the only woman at the whole fucking bank who never gave me grief, and in fact made my day every time I saw her. To whoever said it sounds ‘plausible’ …
Yeah. It’s plausible.
I think maybe some of that $350 billion we gave to those same banks could have been better spent giving that woman her job back. But no, you go on and keep that. You probably need it more.
