It has been a long 12 months for me as well as over 550 other laid off RJ employees. I still am in contact with a few former employees as well as a few still at RJ in IT. Paul should be ashamed of how he handled this. As soon as he saw that RJ was NOT hemorrhaging money he should have directed HR to contact every one of us and attempt to get us back. I'm not sure how many would come back (maybe that is what scares HR and Paul). Just knowing the people that I know that were laid off I believe a large number were over 55. It is nearly impossible to get back to where we were at such an age. I personally am in a good place but I have doubts for many others. Thank you for looking out for us Paul. Oh and I would add Bella and Vin, don't they see how many open positions there are in IT, how many people have left IT in the past year and all the intellectual knowledge that has been lost. Why haven't they tried bringing us back?
9 replies (most recent on top)
I suggest you tell those 3 people trying to get back into RJ they are wasting their time...
Well RJ just bought another company. So nice of Paul. Yet hear we are 550 let go a year ago, over 500 open positions constantly so people leaving as fast as they are hiring. Yet 3 different people I know trying to get back in can’t. Someday Paul will pay.
Since most of these posts seem to be recent, was there b4 Paul, b4 Bella, b4 Vin. Life at RJ was good, had fun, enjoyed lifelong friends, I still have 5 years later. I wasn't laid off, left for personal reasons 5 years ago. The only layoffs under TJ were apologetic because never had been done in the history of the company. Some people were hired back. Enter the realm of Paul Reilly, bella, Vin, who DO NOT care about you and/your opinions, special place for them. Massive layoffs, always a lot of older seasoned people from IT but never lower the number of Indian contractors who do sub par work and do not do after hour support because they were contractors. I loved RJ for the first 15 years I was there. The remaining time was backstabbing, ladder climbing and the true dogged corporate culture of cya all the time. There are better places to work. Best of luck.
as long as the patchwork quilt of a systems environment is holding together RJ (think Paul) will do nothing. They are happy with the pions doing slave labor work while he gets his stock options. Watch the executives leave as soon as there is a huge incident that shows the true colors of RJ
Where are the news people looking into things?
not that this is going anywhere but I agree totally with these posts. Paul, Bella and Vin someday will feel the pain we do.
I hope Paul, Vin, Bella and HR VP's are reading this. They deserve all the scorn that is shown them, not that they care. I hope all of the "worker bees" are doing as best they can. If you are still at RJ, milk it for all it's worth. Remember if you leave you lose your sick time so make sure you don't have any accumulated. I had an interesting conversation a couple weeks back with a former peer still at RJ. He was on an incident call for an issue. There were probably 40 people on the call and the only people talking were the incident people and they had to actually direct their questions to specific teams and people. My friend said he understood the issue immediately but didn't say a word since it wasn't in his area of responsibility. It took nearly an hour to resolve something that could have been done in 10 minutes. The bulk of the time was on getting the "paper work" done. So happy I am not at RJ anymore.
Let this be a lesson for us all.
Outside of the 1% of the companies that put employees first (e.g., Gravity Payments, CEO Dan Price), 99% put stockholders first. We can debate the merits separately.
Most financial pundits recommend having one year salary saved in cash, or cash equivalents. This savings also includes health insurance on your own; estimate $10,000 per year.
It now looks like 1.5 or 2 years salary saved in cash. Another benefit of having so much cash is that at any time, you can say, "Take this job and shove it. I ain't working here no more," and walk out the door.
you answered your own question, RJ management and HR is afraid of the response (both publicly and privately) they would get if they did this. Would probably be in the news big time. I think that RJ could have put a very positive spin on trying to bring people back and letting the world know. It would have shown they are human, make mistakes and learn. Wait, not sure Paul is human anymore....