Personal Updates- Retrenchment and Loss Of Job.

While my company is still profitable, my overseas Headoffice has strangely thrown down the axes to retrench some of our staff fronting the Singapore office. The Group Chief Financial officer (the "CFO") has also made a threat to me over our MS Teams meeting that if they do not see as much profits as prior year after this first batch, they will rain down more flying axes on us. I was extremely disappointed as unfortunately, I did not get the axe in this initial phase. As a matter of fact, I was very jealous of my colleagues in the operations team who got it. A golden handshake package pegged to market practice was given out to individual staff affected. What a good opportunity to get "special bonus" and then quickly look for another replacement job. 

Despite the recent stock markets crash due to the imminent recession, there are still plenty of job opportunities out there- I have lost 75% of the staff on my finance and accounting team due to the vibrant job market (there are grave shortages of accountants I was told as new undergraduates are all studying Information Technology and looking forward to joining the Tech industry and no one is interested to do sucky and time consuming accounting work anymore). But of course, for those age 40 and above, finding a new job may take some extra time. The upcoming business slow down should not be as bad as the total economy freeze during COVID lockdowns and this crisis is mainly triggered from the relentless interest rate hike by the US Federal Reserve to tame run-away inflation.  

The upcoming month will be a busy one for me as there are many farewell parties of colleagues to attend to- I am looking forward to drinks session to celebrate. The only thing that is of concern to remaining staff is that my CFO mentioned wanting to do pay cut. Since the COVID pandemic, many bad management practices have been adopted by weird senior management. I have told my CFO and other bosses that this is the first time that I heard of cutting pay when the company is still profitable and I am not even sure whether this is acceptable employment practices by the Ministry of Manpower. During past 2 years of COVID, the company generated tremendous profits from supply chain activities but implemented staff pay cut and stop bonuses in the name of conserving money for working capital due to "future uncertainties". Anyway, please do not learn from the way I spoken bluntly back against the overseas bosses- one may really lose his/her job in the process as Asian bosses do not like staff who talked back at them.