Merger Victims Turn to ‘Swine’ to Help Bring Home the Bacon

Move over, Elks. Look out, Lions. Shriners and Masons, be forewarned: The Swine Singers are coming. The Loyal Order of Swine Singers, that is.

This is a group that believes misery loves company. The fledgling fellowship--its initials spell “LOSS”--is made up of workers whose careers have been disrupted by corporate takeovers.

“Never try to teach a pig to sing,” the Swine Singers advise, noting that executives rarely listen to those whose company they have taken over. “All you do is waste your time and annoy the pig.”

Who are these people?

The offbeat notion came from a clique of executives in Winston-Salem, N.C., a region hit hard by buyouts of RJR Nabisco, Piedmont Airlines, Burlington Industries, Pilot Freight Lines and other companies.

A few months ago, “We were all sitting there crying in our beer and one of us said, ‘Hey--we’ve got a lot in common,’ ” recalled William D. Gardner, a Swine Singer who left his post with Piedmont after it was taken over by USAir.

What they had in common was the stress and anxiety of uncertain futures because of corporate restructuring. The executives thought that a society of fellow sufferers might provide a lighthearted stress release, boost mutual morale through humor and maybe even lead to a jobs grapevine.

Soon afterward, the first 40 Swine Singers were inducted at a black-tie dinner, with souvenirs that included rubber pig snouts and T-shirts with a swinish coat of arms (the fine print says “totus porkus,” or whole hog.)

Now, more than 130 people in a handful of cities including Los Angeles; Boston; New York; Ft. Worth, Tex.; Orlando, Fla.; Lincoln, Neb., and Ft. Wayne, Ind., call themselves Swine Singers.

Ceremonies to establish new “sties”--Swine parlance for chapters--have been held in several other cities, including Seattle, Dallas and Clearwater, Fla. The group has even retained a Winston-Salem public relations firm, McDowell & Associates, to handle public inquiries.

While currently a loose-knit combination of support group and social network, the Swine Singers have ambitions. They seek to offer professional job counseling one day and, perhaps, a relief fund for the human casualties of restructuring.

Short on Funds

“They don’t have a support fund now because they don’t have any funds,” explained spokeswoman June McDowell.

The Swine Singers have their own way of doing things. Members are encouraged, for instance, to signal each other “with a finger under the nose and a discreet grunt,” according to John Hunter, a founding member, whose own marketing career has been disrupted by three takeovers.

Hunter added another piece of porcine wisdom that he attributed to Winston Churchill: “Dogs look up to you. Cats look down on you. Pigs consider you their equals.”’

There is a serious side to all this. Some members, clinging to jobs in taken-over firms, are so jittery about offending their new masters that they keep their membership secret.

In fact, the principal founder--known in some quarters as “His Royal Swineness”--remains “in-hog-nito.”

“Mergers can take a lot of things away from you--your authority, your job,” Gardner declared. “But don’t let them take away your sense of humor or your self-respect.”

It is a struggle faced by many these days. More than 1,300 mergers and takeovers were reported last year, involving more than $457 billion in deals, according to IDD Information Services in New York.

Nagging Fears

One consequence is that many once-secure managers have a nagging fear that their jobs can be plucked away if they fail to meet rigorous standards of performance.

“It used to be that if you made it to vice president of a big, stable American company, you’d really made it,” said Stanley R. Weingart, a psychologist and senior lecturer at the USC School of Business Administration. “Now it’s pretty iffy. If you don’t produce this quarter, you might be out.”

When a takeover actually occurs, he said, the stress can be overwhelming: “On a scale of one to 10--with 10 being ‘I’m faced with imminent death’--it’s got to be an eight.”