Who Wears What

How Change Can Affect an Individual

Throughout this course we have learned how changes in the workplace can affect both indivduals and organizations. This is especially interesting how an individual reacts and adapts to a secondary change, such as being forcibly made unemployed. To explore this concept I interviewed Kevin Sullivan, the former Vice President of Fireside Bank. Fireside Bank was an insurance company that nationally gave loans to people who bought cars at car dealerships. Fireside Bank was the only non-insurance company subsidiary of Kemper Insurance.

When the recession hit, Kemper Insurance was forced to reconsider its holdings. As auto sales plummeted and unemployment skyrocketed the company got nervous that their holdings in the auto insurance industry, in particular Fireside Bank, would lead to disastrous profit losses. Kemper believed the profit losses in the auto insurance industry would come from a few sources. They believed that the increased number of unemployed, and therefore salary-less people would be unable to make car insurance payments. Therefore, they would lose profits both from people defaulting on their insurance payments and a reduced amount of people purchasing auto-insurance (even if they had a car). Additionally, Kemper believed that fewer people would be able to buy cars so the market as a whole for auto- insurance would shrink. Because of these reasons, Kemper Insurance, specifically the board of directions and c-level executives, decided that it was in their best interest to downsize and move out of the auto-finance industry.

When Mr. Sullivan received news of this decision, he remarked that his “heart stopped for several seconds.” He never thought a change like this, losing your job due to downsizing, would happen to him. Not only did Mr. Sullivan lose his job, but so did all of the other Fireside employees. There were no accommodations done by the Kemper to relocate any of the employees from Fireside back into the...