Once upon a time, lets say in 2007 or so this company was owned by Siemens. Things were pretty good comparatively during these years; we got annual bonuses, incentives for good attendance, a responsive HR department and managers who were interested in growing their team.
Then Atos came along and gutted the company of anything and everything that gave it a soul. They spun off a subcontractor company called NSCglobal where leadership consisted of senior Siemens HR people and fired thousands of people and forced them to work for less pay and minimal benefits.
They almost completely halted all merit increases to pay and started slowly stripping back incentives like PTO and other benefits. They fostered a toxic, adversarial culture where different segments of the company couldn't trust each other and have always been trying to screw each other over in business.
You may be asking yourself "why, if this is the case, did I stay on board for so long? " Well I provided dedicated support to an awesome client that treated me with respect and made me part of their team. They trained me and let me be involved with many of their senior IT staff.
There was never any respect or incentives outside of this situation, so when this client moved on to a better IT service provider, I asked for a title and pay that matched my actual duties (I had long been responsible for tasks well above my pay grade) and was ignored; and subsequently moved on to a new employer.
Some of the things I have witnessed over the years :
- forcing people to work without breaks, and sometimes without pay (people being threatened with termination to show up before the beginning of their shift)
- Managers keeping tally on their whiteboards of how many people each supervisor had fired as sort of a game
- People with severe illness being fired for bogus reasons
- Periods of time where threats of termination were e-mailed out on almost weekly basis for minor infractions of policy
- Senior associates being forced to accept pay cuts and loss of benefits to keep their job
- Managers intentionally breaking contract obligations to clients to pad their SLA's
- Supervisors making less money than your typical White Castle employee
- Employees being forced to pay travel expenses out of pocket
- Employees who were strung along for months or years with the promise of being made full-time with benefits only to be fired right before their transition date
- Widespread abuse of probationary period guidelines
- Exploitation and manipulation of employees with children who couldn't afford not to have a job or have the time to search for a new one
- Annual implementation of forced furlough / unpaid time-off policies to offset pay increases
