When companies downsize, it usually isn’t the bosses who get fired. Somehow it’s the worker bees who are let go, while the management drones are naturally sacrosanct. The drones protest that they’re doing important work, of course. It’s what people like that always say.
Nor is this as gendered a thing as some would have it. We also have people like this:
The peons sigh, stare at the wall, and add their compulsory PD to the list of other useless make-work items which clog up their day. The world is carrying far too many overpaid managers already. They are like a swarm of locusts who darken the sun in their passing and strip the crops bare.
Long ago, Monty Python came up with a skit wherein John Cleese tells two pantomime horses that one of them will have to be let go. His solution? A fight to the death: the survivor to keep their job.
Rip off the corporate warpaint from most managers and you’ll find a pantomime horse underneath.*
If private corporations want to pay lots of pantomime horses that’s their lookout. For those on the public purse, we need to organise them into teams and fight each other for the right to stay. At one fell swoop we can get rid of half of our drones. They needn’t fight to the actual death. What we do is this. They go into the thunderdome armed only with mobile phones, personal organisers and briefcases and whack each other until one of them cries HOLD! The winner gets to keep their job. Even the loser gets some much-needed exercise. There might even be a Reality TV contract in it.
So if you’re on a big fat pay package, and our taxes are paying you (set the cutoff at a quarter million pa), then you should be on notice that you will have to fight to keep it. Bring It On!
(*Project managers, OTOH, are a different beast. They are always in short supply, because they are the people who Get Stuff Done. Since the average manager can no more oversee a project to its conclusion than solve Fermat’s Last Theorem, the job of overseeing is handed over to one of the small band of Folks Who Can. Any project managers on the public payroll who can show that they can actually Do Stuff will be automatically exempt.)