I was one of the lucky ones
Many years ago I took on a role as CWF (Complimentary Work Force - long term temps in other words) to an IBM department working in a major financial institution. Roll on about a year and IBM lost the supprt contract to another outsourcer. We sort of heard about this but unoffically from one of the IBM managers as it hadn't been formally anounced then. Over the next month or two, a number of the IBMers who they wanted to keep were subtly reassigned to positions outside this organisation, being CWF this didn't really affect me, although since I'd been there for a certain length of time and was basically doing the same job, I was TUPEd* along with the remaining IBMers. (No, I had a full head of hair, still do).
All was running well, the new company supplied us all with new laptops and mobile phones (cheapest Nokia money could buy - never used mine, just dual SIM'd it in my normal phone) and promised everyone was going to keep their jobs, and we were keeping to about 98% SLA (more on this later). Roll forwards 9 months and financial crisis sets in. New employers offer to keep all of us for a 20% salary reduction - obviously not one of us accepted that so the next thing was a round of redundancies. After the redundancies hteir SLA performance dropped to the region of 60%. None of us have any idea what criteria they chose apart from they seem to have chosen the brightest and best to get rid of. One guy immediately came back as a part time contractor and a considerable number of the rest of us came back a few months later as contractors when they wanted to do another desktop refresh project.
Some time after I'd finished that refresh project, I moved to another contracting role for another global firm in the area, another refresh, this time rebuilding some machines and replacing others. The guy in charge of this was none other than the guy who had managed to keep our SLA figures up in the 90+% region and was very good at migtigating any SLA breaches (the organisation decided to get rid of him rather nastily and shafted him on his severance but he still went fairly happily - he'd managed to get the new position already and was pretty much leaving anyways.) I didn't need to interview for that contract, he saw my name and knew I could do what was going to be asked of me. He told me when I got there that the ones that had been made redundant were the lucky ones, everything fell apart after we'd gone, he was happy to have moved on and escaped the inevitable next round of shaftings. Funnily enough the headcount at the new contract showed a number of familiar faces from the last place, not just from our department either.
(*) TUPE - for those not familiar it means Transfer of Undertakings, Protection of Employment. Basically same job different paymaster, in otherwords they can't end the contract, sack everyone and then bring a load of new people in, it also protects things like medical bonusses and pension rights.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
