I can't get on your change-train when you keep trying to throw me off the caboose!

Today at work, everyone received a full-color, elaborately (and terribly) laid-out magazine to advertise the companies new "Customer Focus." I'm assuming this is related to our VP's new mission statement and his call for us to jump on the "change-train" of this new company culture they have been pushing. There have been many changes since I started working here and NONE of them make me want to get behind the success of the company.

For example, we were recently notified that, because of growing concerns that our customers will be badly effected by the economy, the company will be trying to be conservative in their spending and will be reducing our 3% maximum merit raises to 1%. Now I know that there are many people who are not getting raises at all, taking pay cuts, or losing their jobs altogether, but how can I believe that the company is concerned about their spending when I am receiving full color laminated posters with the mission statement to replace the full color poster that I already received, a new color name plate to go under my existing name plate outside my cube, very large full color posters internally advertising the launch of our new web platform that we are all working our butts off to prepare (it's not like we don't know it's coming), and now this wonderful internal magazine that they recommend we show to friends and relatives. They have never given us anything like this before in the year and 3 months I've been working here. Does this seem like a conservative spending move?

Of course they won't have to be worrying about paying us for long since they have been planning for over a year now to move our department somewhere they can pay someone half as much as us for the same work (first it was Malaysia, now Arkansas). Yet we are constantly criticized for not getting behind the company goals.

If only this company could realized that they need to stop being entirely hypocitical and stop treating us all like children, they wouldn't be alienating so much of the talent that they desperately need right now.