10-14 hrs daily with some having to work Saturday and/or Sunday....so many employee cutbacks that they're forced to 'take up the slack' or lose their jobs
It sounds so familiar......
I worked for Motorola for 41 years. I was in various groups / teams during that time. I was in the cell phone group when the Nextel "walkie talkie" phone wad designed, and manufactured in Florida. The plant had about 5000 employees, and the company had about 140,000 world wide. Nextel was a latecomer into the cell phone market, but had a unique product. We played catch up for the first 3 or 4 years. During that time there was a period of 16 weeks where I worked 10 to 12 hour days, 7 days a week. I finally cracked under pressure and told my boss that I had to find another job. Either I was going to have a heart attack, or he was going to have a phone up his a$$, either way I would be leaving the building in a city vehicle (cop car or ambulance). He didn't care......engineers were cheap.
I found a job in the advanced development group.....they wanted someone to design and build "proof of concept" prototypes. Cool, like I get to BUILD SOMETHING, not sit in some boring meeting arguing about what color an icon needed to be on a flippin phone.....It seemed that nobody could do that job, and the few that could, didn't want to......Hey, going to work was fun again.....for a while.
About 10 years down the road the phone group was gone....bought by Google, then sold to Lenovo (Chinese). Wall street corporate raiders had dismantled the company and sold off all but one of the parts. Layoffs happened daily. 140,000 people had become 18,000 with only 2500 left in the USA. The plant where I worked that once had 5000 people then had about 500.
Then I got the letter from the CEO......take the buyout, or be laid off. I took the money and ran. Most of my friends thought it was a bluff, they were laid off. There are about 200 people left in that plant, which has been sold. It is being refitted into a medical park......welcome to corporate America 2106 edition.