It sounds good, zab. And while I philosophically agree with you, the bitter fact is that stockholders (big institutional investors) trump stakeholders (workers) every time. CEOs know that they need to get both top line and bottom line growth or The Board (populated by those institutional investors) will get someone else who will. If that means squeezing more out of the labor force, so be it. If that means outsoucing, so be it. If that means shipping jobs overseas to sweatshop labor markets, so be it. The harsh reality is that there really always is someone else who can do any given job and usually will do it cheaper.
Of course, that means that the entire concept of employee loyalty has gone the way of the dinosaurs. There is very little loyalty left on either side of the fence, management or labor.
But there is still some, albeit, not quite as obvious as we might like. One could argue, in your case for example, that WalMart was showing some appreciation for your service by raising your level of vacation to 4 weeks. That shows, to some degree, that they appreciated your staying with the company. The fact that you weren't able to take it when you wanted to, however, placed a bit of a damper on it. And if your illness was the cause for dismissal, then that really takes the edge off.
AI
