So last night the layoff at work finally hit me. I was already disappointed, and sad to see many of my friends go. But I didn't cry until the evening before my 3 day vacation. Not until I had time to. I was too busy to deal with, or even have, feelings about the catastrophe.
I'm still angry that half the floor educators were fired, after 6 months of attrition - not letting any educator who left be replaced. They fired 8 people this week on top of not replacing 5 others. You've got to fire a lot of people if you're going to decimate a museum to not go bankrupt. But this layoff was not done fairly. One team was cut in half, others were barely touched.
I have some survivor's guilt; my job is funded by grants, so it doesn't save any money to fire me. And I know these are tough times. But I am angry that the suffering isn't being shared equally. It's hard to get a job done without enough people to do it. But why should serving our customers be the only job that we stop doing? It seems like if our product gets really crappy, people might stop coming even more drastically than they are now.
1 comment:
Not to mention that many, many of the people they let go had been there for a long time. There is an incredible loss of knowledge kept by the people who are no longer there, and we won't have access to any of that experience any more. I estimated that Museum Education alone lost 60 years worth of experience, and as a whole, we lost over 150 years.
Post a Comment