Thank you for your response. I haven't been able to go to work without a serious pit in my stomach after all this.

I have talked to a couple of people who've said the same thing about reporting it, getting with the HR director and filing a grievance.

I will check out "evernote.com" and get this in the works.

As a 'right-brainer' design practitioner, I find the tips you provide to us to be very useful mostly because, we tend to forget that we speak to professionals of a different mentality and context.

This is why (now more than ever before), a 'right-brainer' should understand that his/her responsibilities don't stop at the design thinking and design implementation levels but, move even further and into the levels of business comprehension and articulation of communication.

Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts and advice.

Best,
Bill Pantos

BULL! I just read your post and almost choked on my breakfast! I wouldn't be so worried about the change in "exceeds to meets expectations" though. The real serious issue you have is the overt and woefully illegal discriminatory comments you had to endure from your supervisor's stupidly naive jabber mouth! This burns me up to my core the nerve!

I'm curious, did your supervisor make these comments in writing or were they said to you during your review? Either instance is illegal, truly it is! Have you mentioned that these comments were made to you with any of your colleagues at work? If not, you need to immediately respond by filing a grievance with your HR department. Document the occurrence in Evernote (evernote.com). If those comments were made during your performance review, I would address your dissatisfaction with those statements in your comments section of the review. Then I would privately contact your local Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and meet with one of their attorney's to clarify if you were discriminated against under the laws of our great country.

Employers truly need to educate their managers on what is and is not appropriate/legal things to say to employees in the workplace. As a manager your personal feelings need to stay out of many of your conversations with employees. Even if they are planning to downsize or cut costs this manager stupidly articulated to you that it is mainly because you and your team are "old." That is very, very, very wrong and not how company's operate in this economy without getting slammed by class action lawsuits. It's just as wrong as saying it's because you are a woman, black or disabled.

Your manager at the very least deserves a severe reprimand or worse. This manager is seriously a law suit waiting to happen for your company. Hell, if your team is cranking out 210 projects a month - successfully and with good quality - pack your toolboxes and leave. This manager will get fired when that monthly bill comes in over twice as much as it would have cost to keep your team in place. Below is the EEOCs definition of Age Discrimination along with their national website address. Please update us and most importantly be careful in how you proceed, this is a very precarious situation. Be strong!

Age Discrimination & Harassment
It is unlawful to harass a person because of his or her age.
Harassment can include, for example, offensive remarks about a person's age. Although the law doesn't prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that aren't very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted). The harasser can be the victim's supervisor, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or someone who is not an employee of the employer, such as a client or customer.

Age Discrimination & Employment Policies/Practices
An employment policy or practice that applies to everyone, regardless of age, can be illegal if it has a negative impact on applicants or employees age 40 or older and is not based on a reasonable factor other than age.

http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm

Regards,
EDR3

But then my new boss laid the big one me...
They took 4 jobs my group was working on and secretly gave the same jobs out to a design firm to work on at the same time. Without my knowing, we were in a contest to see which designs staff liked better. Two of the four came back in favor of the design shop, one was in favor of my team and the other no one won.

It gets better.... Then I was given the name of the design firm and all their accolades and that they were a "younger group." My group's ages are 53,52,52...my production manager is 65.

Then I got the story of "long-timers" like you cost the company more in benefits and salaries. It's more of a "financial" decision and "the way the economy is these days." When they add up all the salaries and benefits, my group ends up costing more than outsourcing all the work to this small design shop who charges more an hour than we do. Then I hear, "Well, they charged $75 hr plus 2 designs with the first 2 rounds of corrections free of charge and then $75 after that.

If you have to work with the staff we do that makes corrections as they go, it'll really end up costing a lot more than our $40 bucks an hour.

Last month, we recorded a record 210 jobs in and out in January. These jobs are shared between 3 designers. I doub't any respected design/marketing & media specialist group is going to want to put up with the insane deadlines and lazy staff we live with day in and day out.

What I can't impress upon my new boss is the value of experience, our overall good reputation with staff, our responsiveness and congeniality while getting incredibly ridiculous deadlines on high design projects. In addition to this, how many "personal" projects we do during the year in between getting the real work done.

Any ammunition to this argument would be greatly appreciated since I wasn't given a timeline on when or even if this was going to happen. We're all in limbo until they "do more looking into" getting rid of my department and team this next year.

Joey