"Workers tend to underestimate [...] the ability of their superiors to change perspective and collaborate on moving forward."
They do however underestimate the ability of their superior to manipulate them into thinking they have a clear understanding of what going forward means and that said superior will honor that agreement.
Did they struggle to find new work because of this termination, and/or had to accept much worse conditions? If not, this didn't really backfire
Said people problems were there classics : unwillingess to retain key people ; salary inversion ; hanging on to toxic people ; etc.
The way to handle this without backfiring would have been to contact a union about organizing, and let them help with the organizing process. You'd need to get more than 6 people on board, and the employer would fight it, but the organizing employees would have had legal protections against retaliation during and after the process.
As-in, sure, technically they could do all of that but some people just want to work and not take on a huge fight that they themselves may not survive. I'm very pro-union but organizing one sounds miserable and thankless. I want to create software, not herd cats and I assume most people feel the same way. I have huge respect for union organizers and would support them but it's not a simple thing.
These people wanted to do their therapist jobs and they asked for the bare minimum and it was rejected (and the were effectively fired for it), I think that tells you how management would react to a union-effort. You might have legal protection but legal protection doesn't put food on the table.
It seems like they exposed a major weakness. My hope is that your wife and her colleagues are better off now.
Do you feel like they still did the right thing?
For these small market healthcare-focused companies (not really hospitals, not really clinics) they're always barely making money. But it's not because they aren't bringing money in. It's because they're incredibly poorly managed. They're super top heavy, and they always pay frontline staff like shit. It's why we saw the incredible rise of the traveling nurse in the past 10 years (and especially during covid), where nurses could make 5x traveling than what they could with a typical FTE job.
You tell me why a facility would rather pay a traveling nurse the equivalent of $300k per year + fees to the placement company for 12 months instead of hiring an FTE at slightly above market rate, which is more like $100-$120k? It's because they have zero ability to make long term decisions and middle management is completely powerless. Managers in these types of business are 100% middle men. They have no autonomy to do anything. Even hiring and firing takes several layers of corporate oversight.
It seems that there is also a labor shortage for good managers.
If a business is already top heavy, how do you get better managers? The traditional argument would be to pay more and get better talent. This honestly seems like a hard problem to solve.
Anecdata, but I’ve seen this backfire tremendously. My wife worked for a skilled nursing facility. They had 18 therapists (pt, ot, and st). 6 decided to stand up to management and demand a lighter case load, a 3% raise (hilariously low I know), and increased transparency from management. They all got put in pips for various “other issues” and eventually all of them were fired. These jobs aren’t that low paying either ($70-$100k / year), so it’s not like finding a new warehouse crew.
Eventually the place ended up downsizing and eventually merging with another facility. The rumor on the inside is that they never really recovered and saw more attrition across other parts of the organization.
I say this backfired because the employees ended up getting fired. Even though in the end the company ended up not doing well.
I guess my point is that never underestimate the stupidity of management. They will let their companies fail in order to not succumb to employee demands, regardless of how benign they might be.