re: #269 iceweasel

Reine— while I don’t doubt your testimony at all, it does depend on the industry, the company, and as Six Degrees mentioned, how smart the managers are.
I don’t at all disagree with you that it’s smarter to keep old staff rather than train new people, and more cost-effective in the long term, lots of industries (especially retail/sales ones) have made it a practice for a long time to dump older employees in favour of hiring newer ones that can come in at a lower starting rate (rather than giving the percentage range raise to an older employee).

retail/sales is especially vulnerable to this because every year it’s about the expenditures vs last year, and they assume a short ‘learning curve’ for training. But it’s been happening in many industries for a while now.

Yes, there are many industries where this does happen, I don’t deny it. But on a large, all across the country scale, all types of business scale, I just don’t think it will happen.

Retail sales is a job category that is also heavily dependent on the peaks and valleys of purchasing patterns. And yes, there is assumed to be a shorter learning curve for folks in those jobs. There are a lot of factors at play in something like retail sales jobs.

I’ll also say that states laws regarding lay-offs and filling the resulting positions are different from state to state. I believe some states have some restrictions on a company doing a reduction in force layoff, then turning around and immediately filling the vacancies. Plus, as I said, companies have to pay for unemployment for laid off employees, adding to their cost of laying off and rehiring. Smart employers would do well to keep their RIF numbers low, to reduce their unemployment costs. A termination for cause doesn’t result in unemployment eligibility for the employee; whereas a termination for a reduction in force does.