I saw a post over the last few days on NextDoor. About a manufacturing company closing. And about a bunch of people who are going to be out of work, possibly near or during the holidays. It gave me pause as these posts always do, because this could be any of us out there.

Even before the onset of COVID, there were people out there talking about downturns in businesses and the way small and midsize companies, and even large companies were treating their employees. I call it the Scrooge factor.

And I spent the bulk of my life in the financial services industry. There were many happy years with wonderful bosses and coworkers, and then they were the bosses who were special, and we will leave it at that.

I remember many many years ago when I was starting out and I worked at then Prudential Securities. I was a sales assistant. A sales assistant falls into the category of support staff in corporate culture, but like operations, a company can’t exist without support staff. That was the year that we were offered a choice of a box of cheap chocolate or a canned ham.

Not to be forgotten were the years that anyone who was not married or didn’t have kids never got first choice of days off during holidays. I called it the spawn factor. It was like you didn’t matter if you were not married and didn’t have kids. It had a definite Scrooge effect in the office.

And then there were other bosses like the one who should have offered employees, health benefits access, no one ever asked the boss to pay for them, but the boss only offered health and retirement benefits to himself. This was the boss that really didn’t care if you had family or not, it was always all about him and quite frankly a lot of the time he was Scrooge, and everyone else was the Bob Cratchit collective.

In case you need a refresher, let me tell you about Bob Cratchit. Bob Cratchit is a fictional character in the Charles Dickens 1843 novel A Christmas Carol. The abused, underpaid clerk of Ebenezer Scrooge, Cratchit came to symbolize the poor working conditions and treatment of employees. And Scrooge? Ebenezer Scrooge was a cold-hearted miser boss who despised Christmas.

I think since COVID started there has been a lot of Bob Cratchiting going around. And definitely a lot of Ebenezer Scrooges.

One of the first things I noticed is when people started working from home, because they really didn’t have much of a choice the concept of business time and family time completely disintegrated, and just became one giant work day. This has continued since then, and most people I speak with who are not self-employed lament the loss of a work life balance, especially because they don’t have a choice because that’s what the corporate honchos want.

This new form of corporate culture for the most part doesn’t care about employees or work life balance, it’s about how the world perceives their power and image, not the actual worker bees who make the magic happen. And actually most self-employed people I know don’t have work-life balance either. They also want to be perceived as a paragon of industrious worker beedom.

No matter where you work, you need downtime. You need time with your family, your friends, even just to sit by yourself and watch TV. But now the problem seems to be we all live to work, as in work takes over everything.

And given inflation and the way the economy is —-and you cannot blame it on Bidenomics because this is a political game of kick the can between administrations. This has been going on for decades, if not longer. No political administration is completely blameless when it comes to the economics in this country. And it’s like a giant game of push me / pull you.

But I have to tell you, since Trump came to office the attitude of boss towards employee I feel has changed. You still have wonderful people who care about their employees, but more and more you just have bosses that care about their employees for show ONLY, and the reality is they treat them like shit.

Lately, all I keep hearing about are businesses closing. Businesses across many categories.

Sometimes the people closing the doors of these companies actually care about their employees, which was the case with this post I read on NextDoor. But more often than not, it’s really about what the head honchos can get out of it and how much money they can walk away from. The employees matter not so much.

And when you hear of businesses closing or doing crappy things to employees during the holidays, it really is like the living embodiment of A Christmas Carol. Only there is no Charles Dickens with a modern update to this cautionary tale. And in the real world there are no guaranteed happy endings.

So those are just some random things I’m thinking about as we enter into the holiday season. The holiday season can be very hard on people, financially and emotionally.

Bah humbugs can become Christmas miracles, but only if we as humans work together. And that includes, we need to stop listening to conspiracy theories and get with the facts.

Thanks for stopping by.