If you are working at a solid rate, why would an employer risk losing you for an unknown replacement?

Let's say you make $10 an hour. That's your full paycheck - taxes and such come out of that. Meanwhile, your employer is actually paying about $5 an hour above and beyond that to employ you - taxes, infrastructure, what-not.

Your take-home pay is $400 a week. That's $20,800 a year to you and $31,200 to your employer. Still with me?

So. Let's say that your job can be done by someone a year newer than you for $9.90 an hour.

To you, that's nothing. That's less than a buck a day. $4 a week, $208 a year. It's $312 to your employer. Still nothing, right? That isn't even a week's pay! to you, anyway. to your employer? It's half a week's pay. It's a one percent cost reduction. And if the decision is made by your boss' boss' boss' boss, that 1% could be across 2,000 employees and suddenly, amongst our $10/hour employees, the VP of Quality Assurance (or whoever) just saved the company over $600k.

And he doesn't know you. He doesn't know your boss. He doesn't know your boss' boss. But he gets to claim that he reduced non-revenue expenses by almost a million dollars (because he'll fudge the numbers) without impacting EBITDA (because it's the only figure they care about). And you're out on the street, and so are two thousand other people, and it's all over a fucking dime an hour and it's grossly unfair, and it's inhuman, and it's all that's wrong about capitalism, and you can either write a book about how much it sucks and get a whole bunch of Stockholm Syndrome employees to piss and moan about how their job doesn't love them or you can recognize that some MBA four levels above you has utter and total control over your corporate fate and plan accordingly.

I got laid off despite the fact that I was the only thing keeping $23m in contracts from crashing to the ground. Wanna see what that actually looked like?

- $11m of that was CompUSA. They could get as pissed off as they wanted, they were dead 2 months later and no one was surprised.

- $6m of that was American Eagle Outfitters. We'd taken the contract at a loss and the sales guy who bought it for us got fired, too. So despite the fact that I was busting ass to fulfill the obligations put forth by a VP, the president was cool letting it wither on the vine. I actually went to his office to try and get one of my contractors paid because we were 3 months late and he refused to do any work until we paid him... and was told that it was policy to let accounts age when there was a dispute even if it was unrelated to the performance of the contractor.

- $4m of that was the N9ne group, whom hated what we'd done because another VP had picked a bad vendor that couldn't do the job (which I'd made clear months earlier). By firing me, my company got to force N9ne to pay penalties dissolving our contract.

- $1m of it was work that my company had fucked up so badly for Jack in the Box that they fired our employer. I'd like to say I did my part to make things work, but the fact of the matter is I had to find a way to duplicate the performance of a $1500 part with a budget of zero and the fact that it cost the budget $40 was a strike against me.

So from my perspective? The company lost $23m when they fired me. From their perspective? They had about $23m worth of contracts they needed to get out of and letting me go was expedient. They learned their lesson; they never tried anything complicated ever again. I was doing things like time-synchronized 4-screen multimedia installs with subwoofers and 40-speaker stereo (they asked, our sales guys promised); their bread and butter is 2 speakers and an iPod in the corner.

They're still doing 2 speakers and an iPod. I'm no longer doing anything for them. In the end it worked out better for both of us but in the moment, they didn't so much as let me know "by the way, all this shit you're busting ass on, 'working at a solid rate', is supernumerary to our forecasts. Might wanna polish your resume."