Tech companies have been retrenching staff members left, right and center, and even local companies such as Carousell have been doing the same as well.
With the retrenchment going around and people losing their jobs around the world, a former Straits Times reporter, Eng Yeow Goh, shared how his colleagues were retrenched back in 2017, according to MustShareNews.
He compared their retrenchment to the tech companies’ lay offs, with some SPH staff not even knowing that they were about to be retrenched.
They had gone to work as usual, before realising that they wouldn’t log in to their computers – they allegedly didn’t even receive any emails or notifications to inform them that “their jobs were at risk.”
Here is what he said
Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones.
I read this BT article and recalled the massive culling exercise in the SPH newsrooms soon after the new CeO, Ng Yat Chung, took over the helm.
Some of the unfortunate staff being culled didn’t even know the fate that was about to befall them.
They came to work and found that they could not log on to their computers.
There was not even the courtesy of an email to alert them that their jobs were at risk.
Some of them had served the company loyally for decades.
Now the tech sector is agonizing over the downscaling of its workforce.
Criticizing the affected companies, as in this case, seems to me like the pot calling the kettle black.
I sometimes wonder if the fortunes of the SPH newspapers would be very much different if it had not gotten rid of some of its best writers, artists and other content producers in that culling exercise.
This is given the myriad of problems which has been dogging the media organisation since then – falling readership and now this huge controversy over fudged circulation numbers.
And all this in the name of costs cutting.
