As Workers Get Ax, Friendships Also Cut

Jan. 8, 2009 — -- After getting laid off in 2008 from her corporate job of five years, Sheila Miller, a marketing professional from the Southeast, noticed a coworker pal who was still with the company "acting strange."

Miller tried to contact her friend outside the office but got the sense that her friend was ducking her calls and e-mails. Not only that, "When I did get her on the phone, she was very quick to hang up," Miller said.

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When confronted, Miller's ex-office mate revealed some disturbing information about a meeting their department's vice president had called with the remaining members of his team:

"He told them they should not interact with anyone who was laid off," Miller said. "They were instructed to sever all ties."

"Of course, this impacted my relationship with a few people. The ones who were afraid," Miller said via e-mail. "I worked for a travel company. We're not talking trade secrets or the making of an atom bomb."

Save for those few exceptions, Miller managed to hold onto the friends she'd made on the job, despite the VP's fondness for asking whether any of his people kept in touch with their pink-slipped counterparts.

But is it always realistic to think that you can pack up your friendships along with your other office tchotchkes after you've been laid off? Or does losing your livelihood and your reason for putting on a pair of pants in the morning sometimes mean forfeiting all social ties to the company too?

We always hear about guilt-ridden employees who didn't get the boot either avoiding their outbound office mates like the plague or smothering them with sympathy, platitudes and parting gifts. But in talking with a number of laid off workers in the past week, I began to detect a few more twists in their relationships with coworkers.