[Les Paul]

I work at a chemical plant that will be shutting down in a year or so due to the fact they are bringing a new plant online in a country with cheap energy, labor, and very lax environmental laws. I'll give you a guess where. I will get to take a slightly early retirement which after 32 years of shift work I am ready for. Thing is we will only run if we have enough people to supposedly do it safely. There are some units that work 800 hrs per year overtime. So they have been having a real hard time keeping people. There are multiple refineries around here and they are snatching people up left and right. We are due for our yearly bonus the second week in March. It is based anywhere from 5-10% of gross pay. Last year that meant most guys got from 7-10+k. We have acess to the internet, e-mail, cell phones etc. At night they leave you alone. I work in a 1 man unit and see nobody at night and have 1-2 phone calls. 12hr shifts. A lot of time to surf the net, read, whatever. They've had a pretty loose definition of what are acceptable e-mails although if you read the fine print they can get you for any kind of sexually oriented e-mails.

So we've gone from 420 employees 10 years ago to 200 now. Making way more product and more money than ever. We get an e-mail from the HR manager last week warning of sexually explicit e-mails bla bla bla, with a final warning to not delete anything in any file. Of course everyone is dumping questionable stuff out the kazoo. So far they've nailed 9 and we've heard as many as 2 dozen could get it. By that I mean no bonus and on probation. At this point so many guys can walk across the road for more money and already have that it is like management is looking for a reason to close this place early. Thank goodness I don't receive this kind of e-mail, they must think I'm to old, so I'm in the clear. I will be surprised if there isn't an ass whoopin or someone going postal.