By Frank Weber
Copyright ©2025
From the first minute I set foot in the place, I said, “I can do whatever you need me to do – just show me once, and I can do it!”
That was a little over a year ago, and here I sit today having been terminated for “presenting a hardship for the company” by my doctor-and-short-term-disability-insurance approved medical leave.
They call it a separation, but it was a termination, a firing, an “adios muchacho” and nothing more.
Calling it a ‘separation’ is nothing more than a way of skirting the dire mentality required to actually terminate an employee…it makes the ‘hatchet-man’ feel a little better about himself as he drops the ax. I call it cowardly.
By the way, I can say all of that because, so sadly, I have hands-on-the-wheel experience with employee terminations over many years as it was always within my professional responsibilities. That and no one else seemed to have the spine for it when it had to be done.
Even so, I get that. Terminations always made me sick to my stomach for the simple reason that it was part of my job to end an employee’s livelihood gained from the company for the “betterment of the company”.
Terminations are not easy, nor should they ever be so.
But that will never change the fact that they must be administered with a cold conviction…and by someone with a spine.
So, let’s spin back to last year when I was first hired.
It had been almost one full year since I had both of my hips replaced, and I was feeling good.
I was feeling much more human because I could once again walk – and walk without a cane.
Sadly, it only took about a month for a new, but very closely related pain to develop.
I was a member of management (or so I was told), so I expected long hours. I’ve never been a stranger to that. I always considered myself to be on permanent call…especially for my guys.
What I did not expect was being required to constantly walk, move and be on my feet for ten to twelve hours a day, sometimes six – even seven days a week. And here’s exactly WHY I was forced to constantly be on the run:
The factory was more than one hundred years old and it was an old, decrepit, reconstituted foundry building. The floors were cold, hard, cracking, rolling and mounded cement. Senior management refused to put ANY monies into ANY type of repair or restoration.
We quite literally had waterfalls inside the shop whenever it rained.
There was NO PA system. There was no paging system of any kind. There was a desk-based phone system, but it was never used. In fact, I couldn’t get IT to connect my desk phone for over three months after I started. No one cared about effective, efficient communication.
The only method for communication was either a walkie or a company cell phone, but guess what? Most of the time, neither of them worked because of so much interference from the building. I had to leave my office to use my cell phone because the room I was in blocked all signals. Most of the time, I couldn’t even send a print from my laptop to the printer sitting three feet away from it.
In short, if I had to get something done – as my job required – I had to quite literally run in circles trying to get it done.
The company refused to even entertain the ‘outlandish notion’ of installing a simple comm-set to make instantaneous communication possible. Funny, even years ago, when I was back in the plating shop – an antiquated operation and facility to say the least, there was always an emphasis on fast, efficient communication possibilities, and – GASP! – they even had a PA system! Not so at this last job – strikingly shocking as it is an extremely large corporation.
So, anyway, I began to get a serious pull in my lower leg, and over a couple weeks, it became a very serious pain in my knee.
With my running and fitness background and experience, I wrote it off to exertion and attempted to work it out like I had done for years.
Finally, the knee pain eased but now the pain had moved down into the middle of my shin.
Likewise at this time, a sharp pain settled into the side of my thigh, just above and to the left of that same knee.
I tried all that I could to alleviate the pain and ‘bulldoze’ through it – just as I had always done before, but none of it ever helped.
By early summer, my life was reduced to a vicious circle of excruciating painfilled 10-12 hour workdays, gulping Advils and Excedrins and trying to sleep (very rarely ever happened), only to have to get back up at 2:45AM to be able to get myself awake and cleaned up to go back into work.
I made the company aware of my pain, but the only thing ever said was, “Oh, are you ok?”
My hours and physical demands continued to be heavy regardless of what was obvious to everyone around the shop.
And then the hottest, muggiest summer on record for the past several decades hit.
The typical temperature was somewhere around 90 degrees almost every day, and the days that weren’t that hot never felt cooler, not even for a second.
Remember, this was an old decaying shop with no ventilation. Nothing but soot and dirt and oils in the heavy, muggy air.
I no longer felt all that good about life.
Now, one of the biggest concerns – or so I was told from the start – was the need to cut costs and save money – “Process Improvement!”
That’s nothing new to me – I’ve done it for decades and I know how to do it.
The first thing I noticed was that not only was the union workforce compelled to work WHATEVER overtime the company demanded, but the whole system was whitewashed.
The guys were working – at minimum 12-hour days with five hours on Saturday, and sometimes even 5-8 hours on a Sunday – and collecting ENORMOUS amounts of regular hours, overtime hours and double time hours. They all claimed that their labor agreement allowed the company to force overtime – a claim that I have never believed based upon my twenty years as Manager of Labor Relations – and whenever I questioned the practice, I was brushed aside as an ignorant irritant.
I still maintain there’s something not-quite-right going on there.
I still maintain that all that excess was in NO WAY necessary to satisfy Customers.
Ok, fine, but that doesn’t change the fact that the company was – and still is – hemorrhaging money on this practice. So, I set out to find ways to alleviate the problem.
At first, I was able to reduce the total hours down to ten hours a day, Saturdays ONLY with a pressing need.
This INFURIATED a core group of long-time union guys (really only five of them) that LIVE on the ‘free’ overtime and ‘free’ double time.
Then things began to sour. These five guys went on the warpath.
Unfortunately, they were an assumed integral part of maintaining the archaic, 1950’s work atmosphere that THEY wanted to keep and the company was too terrified to change.
It was believed that it was better to allow it than to make any real change in the system.
It was believed that no one else in the free-speaking world could EVER do what they did.
There was never a willingness to change for the better – it would’ve meant actual, analytical management. It would’ve meant actual, methodical and meticulous training. That was NOT going to happen.
It was all just smoke to maintain the status quo.
And they began to complain and force their issue with my boss – interestingly enough a guy they had been working with and known for a number of years – by insinuating that things could go “very wrong” and they wouldn’t be able to ship as much without free reign over their hours.
I was the real problem because, in their own words, I just didn’t understand what it took to get things done.
And just like that, my boss began to intensely micro-manage me and reverse ALL of my efforts in favor of unlimited overtime and unlimited double time, in particular for those five guys.
Not everyone in the union workforce wanted to live their lives inside that shop.
The whole effort was commanded by five guys and the fear they created.
At that same time, I saw the only ‘starlight’ I was to ever find in that job…a good number of the guys saw what I was trying to do, but much more importantly, they began to understand – through my actions – that I had their interests in mind, right alongside production interests.
They could see they would benefit from it.
They began to understand that I was not just some token supervisor for the company set in place to harass them.
I fought to limit overtime and double time, not to just cut costs, but also to give my guys some relief. They are quite literally forced to work themselves into the grave.
Some of these guys had a one-hour commute.
That means it’s one hour to drive to work, twelve hours at work and a one hour drive to get home!
Until I came along, seemingly no one in management ever thought about that. Or cared.
I do not subscribe to such a cold, discriminate attitude of ‘company life first’.
At that point, I knew that I did make an impact and I made it in exactly the right place.
As you can see by just turning on the news these days, when you hit that one, specific – and usually hidden – raw nerve, all hell will break loose in an attempt to protect what’s being hidden.
There’s usually a pretty good reason for this insanity.
But the guys that did understand this made it all a little more bearable for me.
Management is NOT only there to protect and foster the company, management is ALSO there to protect and foster the workforce. There is no question about it.
And then my boss came out and told me that his boss didn’t think I was doing anything and questioned why I was even there. He said that his boss demanded to know ‘why’ I didn’t yet know ‘everything there was to know’ about the operation.
The answer he gave? “I’m waiting for Frank to get his feet under him first.”(This was after almost seven months)
And the reply he got? “I thought he was going to be better than that.”
This is what he told me, anyway.
Remember the first line of this essay?
From the first minute I set foot in the place, I said, “I can do whatever you need me to do – just show me once, and I can do it!”
That plea had continued all the way up until he dropped that one on me.
He refused to be bothered with showing me anything new. Once in a while, he’d make a production out of telling someone else to show me and it always got ignored.
So, I was stuck between micro-management and a higher-up-on-the-ladder boss’ flawed and uninformed opinion of me and my abilities.
Not only did I have the incessant physical pain caused by the job, but now I had the fresh realization that I was being hung out to dry – by the ‘five guys’, by my boss, by his boss.
It’s a pretty hopeless feeling to have to contend with along with the uncertainty of an increasing, unpredictable and unknown pain.
And then, after being forced to work a full eight hours on a Sunday after having to be on my feet for the full six days before it, my lower leg began to swell and the pain became unimaginably unbearable. At that point, I could just barely walk, even if I used my cane.
I went back to my doctor again and this time, he sent me for an ultrasound.
The hospital was not going to let me leave due to their findings and I sat there for over four hours before I finally got up and walked out. Yes, it was that severe.
The next day I was on my Xarelto regimen to hopefully clear the multiple blood clots (DVT) they found throughout my lower leg.
I could not work under my existing working conditions any longer as I recognized that doing so could be a catastrophic risk to my personal health, and in fact, to my life.
And my doctor agreed.
After the first two weeks out on approved leave, HR informed me that the company could not make any accommodations for my job and I would have to be completely released by my doctor, without restriction or problem in order to return to work. In other words, I had to be in perfect health to return to the job that would only destroy my body further if I were to return.
So, months passed without any real improvement, but every bit of the pain remained.
I’ve been almost completely immobilized. I try walking whenever I can and I have – under doctor’s supervision and guidance – in hopes of strengthening the leg, but the pain and pulling and tightening all persist right along with all of the side effects of the necessary meds.
It became clear that I would never be able to fit the HR definition of “ability to return to work”. Let’s add the psychological stress of this into the already bubbling cauldron of pain and mental anguish.
Sounds fun, doesn’t it?
Then, two weeks before my next scheduled doctor’s appointment, I received the call I had been expecting:
The company was ‘separating’ from me because my ‘indefinite’ medical leave became a hardship for the company.
HR fired me over the phone.
HR wanted to ship my ‘personable effects’ to my home instead of me coming in to get them.
HR had no clue that I still had my company phone, laptop and walkie – it was after I made them aware of this that a day was set up for me to drop off their stuff and pick up my stuff.
It was apparent that HR did everything they could to prevent me from setting foot in their company again.
Peculiar way to treat a ‘member of management’, don’t you think?
Cold and cowardly. But, that’s business.
You’d think I had been convicted of a crime.
At the very least, I am definitely not welcome in any way…or was I ever a part of that organization.
Now, I’ve been in the business world for many, many years and I understand the ‘at-will’ dynamic, and quite honestly, I expected that call long before this – especially given all of the company elements lined up against me – the big five, my boss, his boss, total indifference to my condition.
I also know – from firsthand involvement – that a union employee (one of my boss’s friends) was permitted to flounder on an unlimited wave of ‘medical leave’ for months on end and without ever a question having been raised.
When I questioned the practice – and reminded them that the company has rights – I was summarily rebuffed for it.
The company’s ‘rights’ didn’t matter to any one of them until they wanted to apply them to me.
But it’s no real surprise.
I never fit into this company and no one there ever wanted me at their company.
Believe it or not, I caught no end of grief because I was a ‘west-sider’ and practically the entire facility was ‘lower to far-east side’.
I was always kept at arm’s length, just short of being completely shut out.
Damn near every person there made that glaringly obvious from my first day.
Just the right folks were in a position to push me out, and that’s just what they did.
Fucking ridiculous.
The only plus to this entire rolled-up ball of shit was this…my doctor found the blood clots and we began immediate treatment.
We don’t know if they were the result of one or both of my hip replacement surgeries or if they came about because of the total hip-failures that forced the replacements in the first place, or if they were exacerbated by my current working conditions, but we found them.
I was unknowingly walking around with a ticking time bombs in my leg – quite literally with the possibility of killing myself at any moment. So, there’s that.
Here’s the kicker:
I never had to go back to work after my surgeries.
No, I wanted to go back to work.
I knew I could do that or any job and I knew that I could do it well – and I did.
I knew that I could make a difference, and I did. Right up until the time that the difference began to produce results and disrupted the ‘sweet deal’ these people had going on for themselves.
So, here I sit typing and venting one last time on it.
There is SO much more that went on, but I’m not here to write a book about any of that.
This is meant to be a cautionary essay.
Take care of your physical, mental and emotional self before all else.
Never bulldoze through obvious pain thinking that you’re doing some great service for the company because you are not. If you die today, your job will be posted by morning.
Make no mistake – it is business and in the real, business world, the employee does not matter.
If you are in management – true Management – take care of your people FIRST.
Everything else will fall into place from there.
Too many people take jobs and promotions just to be known as managers but they are nothing of the kind. They are NOT real Management.
You must take care of your people because they are the real builders of the company.
Everyone else is just along for the ride.
But…I guess that’s how it goes.
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