They saw it as a lack of empathy

Company president Aaron Feuerstein immediately announced plans to rebuild the company—and to keep all the displaced employees on the payroll in the meantime. The media hailed him as a mensch. But in making sure the new construction would meet the highest quality and liability standards Feuerstein ended up spending more money than he had. And the company went bankrupt.

View Video A middle aged worker whose job was replaced by automation reflects on how the loss changed her life. As with many classes Sucher s students shared differing opinions. Two thirds of them thought the guy was an idiot that he should have just sent the jobs to China where he was going to build a factory anyway or to Mexico where the costs would be much less Sucher recalls. The other third admired the guy for understanding the gravity of being a major employer with Poland Mobile Number List deep roots in the community. But Green and Rosales thought the conversation lacked a key element a consideration of how layoffs might have devastated the factory employees at Malden Mills.  They didn t seem to understand the impact that layoffs could have on families who didn t have a lot of resources at their disposal says Elana Silver now a talent development consultant at State Street a Boston based financial services company. For most of my classmates and for myself getting laid off would be a temporary hardship.



We wouldn t face the domino effect that many people face when they don t have savings accounts or other resources that my classmates and I had. Emotional Costs And Worst Practices And so the students teamed up with the professor on a research project that would look into the effect of layoffs on companies on communities and most of all on employees. The initial drive was to build empathy around the decisions that are so core on a human level Sucher says. They wanted people to learn about that. Green and Rosales interviewed several people who had been laid off from a job—or several jobs.