alki_2008
JoB, for many of the ‘retention’ employees (like our own local “bank”)…the ‘retention’ contracts were put into place after the takeover/seizure/reorg in order to keep the employees that knew the company’s systems from leaving for more secure employment elsewhere.
It’s not just an issue of ‘scarcity of employees’. Sure, company’s could hire other people – but who would train those new hires and how long would it take for those new hires to ramp up to the company’s specific systems? Many of the retention employees are 100% sure to be fired at the end of their contracted X months, so do the taxpayers really want to wait for new hires to ramp up and then just be fired after X months…or just keep the current employees that don’t need to ‘ramp up’ and pay them a retention bonus to ensure they don’t bail?
The morale of employees that work for bailed out companies is bad enough. No matter what low-level role a person has in a company, the way they feel when people react to hearing their employer’s name can make them feel even worse. Someone at a bailed out company could be doing the exact same job role as someone at Google, and yet be treated so differently that it’s hard for them to stay at the bailed out company even with a retention bonus at the end of their X months.
The real crooks at AIG and the bailed-out banks are already gone and living it up in Europe or the Caribbean or somewhere else luxurious and warm. The employees that are left are just trying to piece things back together and ensure things don’t fall apart even more. Give them a break!
One last thought. Besides the imminent loss of their jobs, many retention employees (not just execs) lost lots of equity in their home, lost the value of their previous years’ bonuses that were given to them in stock shares, lost money in the stock market, etc. It’s not as though they live in some insular economy that keeps them from feeling the same effects as everyone else in the country.