My Daughter Was Fired Today

[DFW]

75. This kind of thing seems to happen everywhere

My wife was in a similar situation. She is a social worker, and had a decades-long job with a Protestant Church-affiliated organization that trained the difficult-case unemployed (the ones that social services decided they couldn't handle) and tried to place them back in the workforce. Her boss was a corrupt asshole with church connections, and so was never fired, even when it was discovered that he was ordering workers with the necessary skills to do home improvements on his house without pay. He always had a lackey to do his dirty work for him, and they always ended up getting screwed by him, tossed out on their ear when he determined they knew too much.

But my wife and the woman who was her co-worker knew WAY too much, and he couldn't fire them without strong cause, which they never gave him. So, he mobbed them, sometimes using really crude tactics. One morning, my wife came to work to find her files had been deleted from her work computer--a perfect pretext for the obvious inefficiency charge he could use to fire her. Instead, at the meeting of the management, she just told them that her files had been removed, she knew by whom and why, and they were to be back on her computer by the end of work that day. They never expected her to take such a confrontational stance, and mumbled something about a programming error. The files WERE back by the end of the day. This guy arranged for money to be missing from petty cash, and then firing employees/trainees for suspected theft. He was always covered by his church connections. He never forgave my wife for having cancer in 2001, and being out for much of the year. When she needed a heavy thyroid operation in 2012, she and her co-worker used the occasion to take early retirement, demand a big settlement (they had a really good labor lawyer on call), and quit at age 60. She lost her health insurance, and I had to jump in and pay for her insurance until she turned 65 (no, Virginia, Germany does NOT have universal health care). She got a really drastic cancer when she was 64, so this saved us. Luckily, the expert cancer team saved her as well.

I contrast this with my situation during the Cheney-Bush recession. When things got tight, all the top-paid people in the company took a (voluntary) 50% pay cut except the two co-CEOs, who went down to a $1 per year salary for the duration. This way, all the lower-echelon employees kept their jobs AND their salaries. We fired nobody (we are about 500 people worldwide, more than 400 of them in Dallas). Needless to say, since we only hire whom we really like, we have a really low turnover. We have women who are department heads and men who are department heads. Since it is not a rarity either way, no one really gives it a thought one way or the other.

In short, you have to make the best of what you can find, where you can find it. My wife wanted to punch her "snake" boss right in the throat on so many occasions, I lost count. Despite what some internet armchair warriors might tell you, Europe isn't always a worker's paradise, and Texas isn't always a worker's hell. For the record, I've spent more time in Iceland than I've spent in Kansas, so I have no clue what it is like there.