Saturday, October 20, 2018

Laid Off in Arizona Twenty Years Ago





Looking at all those closed frozen bubble faces of the majority of Mormons in Trump's captive white audience in his "Phoenix" Mesa-Gilbert (SLC South) Feel Good and White and Don't Give A Shit about the rest of America Rally, I am reminded how closed and prejudiced and thin the economy it is there in Arizona.

A lot of companies used to get a two year tax exempt invitation to start up in the "Right to Work" (But Really No Right to Form a Union and Earn a Decent Wage) state of Arizona. How cronies and your relatives are already on the payroll in both private and public jobs were a major factor in my disliking most of the jobs I had there.

That I worked for a world class local HMO only to have that company bought out by Anything 4 a Buck Profit Health Care and then the largest block of HMO members in that state got a toll free 1-800 number to call in the Midwest after we got laid off and all those jobs disappeared on Anything 4 a Buck Health's Wharton designed Global Worksheet. That local problems with your healthcare could no longer be handled for walk-ins who came to our various offices and storefronts in the state which disappeared overnight. Wait 20-30 minutes talking to a robot and wait for a "live human being" and listen to canned musak.

That we knew we were going to be laid off. Two years anywhere there in Arizona, the right to work state, and you get laid off when some out of state business bolts that state having figured out that paying half the salary of New York wages only got you 1/4 the work output, all the relatives and cronies factoring into the local work/survival framework. You go to the Unemployment Office and tell them you got laid off but on the form there is no "Why were you laid off" space to write an answer but ONLY "Why were you FIRED from your last job?" in right to work Arizonie? (Beat you down, you lazy, worthless unemployed person put down, feel bad about yourself from the state thingy?)

The manager at the HMO had designated a skeleton staff to last a month or two months past the rest of us being laid off to clean up and box up the operations and ship the records, computer tapes etc. to the Midwest. And all this before India became a favorite off shore center for call centers and operations workings etc.

The manager was a smoker and used to take at least six ten minute smoke breaks a day outside the building with about a dozen nicotine addicts on staff. And surprise, the skeleton staff to mop up was announced prior to lay offs and that list matched her old crony smoker's club. Small world. * 

* Smokers in a healthcare insurance company - some irony and or dark humor there?

Of course the manager did not last until we got laid off. Rumors abounded when we got back from lunch one day when her office was padlocked. Now this is rumor and I cannot confirm but the skinny was that the manager had gotten the job by outperforming the other manager who could not meet management's demand to clean up the 90 day plus accounts receivable fast enough for management with all our new "multitasking" (jack of many; master of none) work diversions piled on towards the end. 

Story was that the successful manager, the good competent IMHO manager got canned btw, merely went on the computer one day and deleted all the aged A/R to meet management's demands.

Brilliant. 

Until an audit of the system. Damned audits. Surprising how successful her resume was and how stupid and non-auditing her past employers were? Sounds a bit like federal gubmint of late work 2 me.

The whole corruption of the matter reminds me of Trump and his white cronies applauding his hate and fear of non-Mormon brown people wanting to try, actually having the ability to do a better job once they get HERE, than the Fake Crony-ied up work force of both the private and public work forces of right to work Aridzona. 

So. it goes, or so it went until we moved back east and we witnessed in the workplaces of the once very productive and progressive work force of New York City only to encounter the cronyism that is now the hallmark of American work force and American government (though no longer democracy I think) --  but No longer what your know or do but rather who U kn(bl)ow -- had permeated and dominated the work place in post-Computer controlled America. 

M.A.G.A. 

U S A -  U S A - U S A ... (all hail the Prophet in SLC?) (Mesa-Gilbert Friday night)


shrug.



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