[cheesy]

I had breakfast with Harold and Jason yesterday. It sounds like things are just as effed up in Europe with management as they are here.
The Brain Trust over there has decided to "Streamline Operations And Consolidate Resources". Translated from Managementese, closing factories, reassigning and laying off staff. It's blown up in their face.

They shut down the UK factory and laid off all but one guy. He gave France a middle finger and quit on the spot.

They did the same to a factory in Germany but kept on about a dozen people and transferred them to the Colmar (the Beaufort of France) location just across the Rhine River in France for less pay. They walked.

The Brain Drain of older, experienced staff is also very high. Younger guys who started around the same time I did are jumping ship in droves. What new staff they manage to hire is gone in less than a year.

About the only successful thing they have managed to do is add extra layers of management across the pond. I get a couple of emails a month, asking me to welcome so and so to a position that didn't exist the week before. Yet, we were promised a larger service staff over here by 2018. It's the end of 2023 and we have fewer guys than we had in Illannoy.

8 more days.