Layoffs Causing Remainders to Bail

My employer, under a hiring freeze has fired three workers in the past 2 months. As a result, there are not enough people to cover the shifts of a 24/7 help desk-call center. In response to this, management has redone our schedules and will, come the beginning of March, require us to work different shifts, ranging from 7 a.m to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, to 12 hour shifts from 7 p.m to 7 a.m. spanning weekends. Also, the workers will now be "on call" for covering for evening and weekend workers. To make matters more interesting, employees will not be paid for the on-call time. In short, our free time is now no longer ours.

We were blind sided by the email that arrived yesterday and, according to management, if we have problems with the schedule as it was delivered to us, we are to resolve the issues between ourselves.

It seems that the economic situation is now to a point that the reduced work force is causing more pressure on those who remain employed and many of them are now at the breaking point. For myself, this new schedule precludes my having a second job and caring for my mother who I visit nearly every weekend.

The new schedule almost seems designed to force us to quit. If any more employees are taken from the schedule, then coverage will be impossible. But, being a college town, management will, no doubt, be allowed to hire from the hungry pool of newbies at below fair market wages and save tons of money on wages and benefits.

Conspiracy theory? Yup. No doubt. Whether this is the case or not, the reality is that I cannot work the new schedule, my cube mate, a single mom currently on hemodialysis will not be able to work the new schedule and our former supervisor, a family man with a wife who rides to work with her husband every morning not just to save money, but because they only have the one car, well, unless they can get someone to pick one of them up way out in the country when their schedules diverge or when he is called in after hours, he will not be able to work the new schedule.

That's three of us. Three out of hundreds of thousands of people out of work.