What happened to Employee Loyalty? What happened to Company Loyalty to the employee?

"In the 1960’s there was a fad involving new ways to manage a company.  Peter Drucker was leader of a movement that said that no longer would management come from promotion from within.  Instead professional mangers would run people.  They wouldn’t need to know the businesses because they would be following the scientific management created by the experts in the universities based on the latest social science.  At least that was the way it was supposed to work."

Several companies I used to work for started out as great companies, with great benefits and lots of loyalty from us to the top, and from the top bosses down to us, the employees.

Then the companies hired "Professional Managers", gone were the people who had started in the bottom ranks, and worked their way up.  We had people making decisions who had NEVER worked the job and had no idea what was involved with actually performing the work or dealing with real live customers.

I had some bean counter in an office 3 states away questioning why I was ordering certain things for my store that other stores didn't.  They didn't understand that our store was one of the oldest in the state, that we hadn't been upgraded or remodeled and that we NEEDED those things in case amounts each week.

What happened?

My store was restricted to 1 case each quarter.  That's 1 every THREE months.  When we needed on average a case and a half each week.

What was the item?

Oil dry.  Basically, specially treated cat litter.

My store was old, we had pipes and tanks that leaked behind our dike wall and we had to put out oil dry several times a day to absorb the oil, transmission fluid and everything else.  A case of oil dry was 25 lbs.  and we went through a case and a half a week. 

To comply with EPA and OSHA regs we HAD to clean up the oil daily.  So spread the oil dry, and use the wet/dry vacuum to vacuum it up nightly, then scrub the floor with degreaser and squeegee it dry.

But this bean counter wouldn't let us use the amount of oil dry we needed to stay compliant, and if we tried to order more, we would find it removed from our inventory ordering list.

Well we tried several work arounds.  Regular cat litter, which didn't work like the treated stuff, sand, which was a nightmare, and anything we could think of to try.

Long story short, we got dinged on our next inspection, and because of a bean counter my store was fined over $30k, and we finally got a remodel 2 years before we were scheduled, which cost over $125k.

Oh, and our new inventory list allowed us to order EIGHT cases of oil dry a week.  Which we didn't need anymore.

However the head manager and all of the rest of us employees, we lost our bonuses for the entire year..  That bean counter, cost me, personally, over $8,000.00 dollars that year.

Does anyone wonder why, there are less employees loyal to their companies anymore?

Don't blame the employees, blame the management.