AT&T

Assuring the need for the new position and proper funding and charge codes for it. At a time when working as a Performance Engineer, our group received 15 Solaris (UNIX) servers to use for testing without anyone to administrate them. Having experience in being an admin, I volunteered to set up and manage the servers until other arrangements were made. The position was approved by the next layer of management, along with where the money would come out of the budget to pay me.

Positions can be created to set an employee up for layoff, rather than doing so through normal channels. A surplus, what AT&T calls a deferred layoff allowing 60 days to find a new position in the company before being terminated, was coming. A redundant position of a technical writer was created (we already had a technical writer in the group) to edit test results reports; use of the service was optional. I was removed from a supervisory job I'd held for about four years and put into that position. My former position went to someone else. My technical writer position was deemed unnecessary, and I was surplussed. My reviews were good to very good for 10 years; the director didn't like me, though, so the position was created to get rid of me. Had the director's boss known of the creation of the redundant position, things may not have happened that way. However, I managed to find another position and stay on.

Since labor is a cost and the company is always looking for ways to cut costs, redundant positions should not be created from thin air without some oversight.

Employees in good standing with training costs attached to them should not be discarded willy-nilly; there are more amicable and less costly ways to handle this situation.