“We did this through the elimination of work that was judged to be low priority or simply unaffordable,” he said on Thursday. “We spent $275 million in severance cost to achieve a $450 million annual savings starting this year, $50 million above our target.”
On site they definitely made some huge mistakes cutting valuable people when they could have made far better lay-off decisions for the company. It’s because the people making the lay-off decisions are disconnected with what goes on down below at the worker level. The system even excluded the manager who could have made better layoff choices being closer to obverse what happens down below. Some managers were shocked how the higher ups can make such d-mb stupid mistakes. While I don’t agree that they only laid off only important people, the truth is they messed up pretty bad and it was definitely not fair. And just think some people are getting big bonuses for making big mistakes that will never be measured. I’d say on site it was 50/50. They got around half right and half wrong. If you were to ask me I would also agree that most of Calgary positions are useless, I haven’t observed any value at all from those working in Calgary on how they support site. I have observed some important projects though from Calgary. Still let’s have a heart and realize these were all people with jobs earning a livelihood, but the company for sure could have done better targeting the so called “useless people”. Lots of these kinds of people were completely spared. I also agree with laying off these people but the lay-off machine system that Suncor utilized totally failed to properly target nothing but these people.
I disagree with the previous post. On site we observed the useless people keep their jobs and important people get laid off. This is from site though (people who were supposed to not get laid off being close to the operation in Fort McMurray). I don’t know what happened at the Calgary corporate main office.
A whack of overpaid people for sitting around watching Netflix all day or off shopping in the middle of the afternoon....Can't really blame him there.
HR couldn't even get a hold of people to notify them for a meeting...People gone offline for hours at a time in the middle of the day.
No one to blame but yourself.
And yes, I was aware of why most of these people were being let go and for the most part, most of those let go were in completely useless positions and were taking advantage of the "Work from home" policy....
DO you really need 30+ people to handle company wide email notifications that occur once a month?
The question still has not been answered though. Is Suncor a better company after these layoffs? Certainly they took a chunk out of costs but has production increased? Has maintenance decreased? Has capital efficiency increased? The market does not currently seem to think so.
And of course none of the press or stakeholders bothered to ask what the real number was either. I guess that is what we get for living in an area that does not vote for the party in power and in an unfettered capitalist society.
Actually what happened is that they were short of the 400 million target with the original 1500 layoffs. So they went way over and kept cutting people hitting a new goal of 450 million. But they went way way over 1500. The 450 million in annual wage savings was Freddie’s bragging point, but the total number of people laid off was not announced, only the final dollar figure.
Mission accomplished is right!! Freddie fired those highly educated / productive individuals working to progress energy transition projects such as Blue Hydrogen, SAF, and HRD. Now while other fuel producers pass us by, Suncor can focus its energy on reducing the cost of mining tarsands while purchasing biofuels to blend to meet government mandates instead of producing our own.
If that is true @fql+1rm6fcMs then the severance was low … average of $183k over 1,500 employees. Sad end to a 20 year career.
A one time charge was booked in 2023 for the full severance cost. So no impact to 2024.
Bet he gets a tasty bonus for taking food off the plate for many Alberta families. So glad I retired before he came in. Just waiting for him to start messing with the pension plans.
He is the most full of sh-t CEO for any place I’ve ever worked for.
$275 million in 2023 but since Suncor severance is paid out monthly, there will be more in 2024 !!