Former pharmaceutical employees describe missed termination notices, unexplained restructuring, and job searches that continued long after their employers moved on. Their experiences raise questions about how companies decide which jobs are expendable.

IImagine spending a whole day waiting for a phone call that decides whether you still have a job. Your employer has announced layoffs and told everyone to stay available from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. The hours pass, the phone never rings, and you start to believe you made it through. Then you try to open Microsoft Teams and your access is gone. You reach your manager on LinkedIn and learn that you and your entire department were cut. Nobody remembered to call you.

That’s what a former Novo employee told BioSpace in an investigation published October 28. The worker was one of roughly 400 people let go in May at a Bloomington, Indiana, manufacturing site Novo acquired from Catalent. Their name, they said, was simply missing from HR’s call list. BioSpace collected three accounts, including one from a former Sanofi employee and one from a scientist at a company he asked not to name. Together, they show how a restructuring can look orderly from the executive suite while leaving confusion, financial strain and long career setbacks for the people whose jobs disappear.

Pharma is a revealing place to look. Its workers include scientists, manufacturing specialists and regulatory experts whose skills take years to build. But expertise doesn’t protect anyone when a company consolidates sites, outsources work or changes priorities. And even generous severance can’t promise there will be a comparable job waiting.

A layoff nobody announced. The Novo employee had already survived several rounds of cuts at the Bloomington site. When they finally learned their job was gone, they still didn’t get a clear reason. “Nobody clearly stated the reason for the layoff,” they said, adding that they heard the word “sustainable” far too many times. The site had real problems: the FDA issued a warning letter in November 2025 citing significant manufacturing violations. That’s important context, but it doesn’t explain why every one of those jobs was cut. For the worker, the harm wasn’t just losing the job. It was finding out through a disabled account.

The job was cut. The work wasn’t. The former Sanofi employee was told in March 2025 that part of their job would be outsourced, and HR decided what was left didn’t justify keeping the position. The employee disputed that: the outsourced piece was a small slice of their work, and “our whole team had been working to the point of burnout for over a year.” Their manager had been asking to hire one or two more people. BioSpace didn’t establish whether Sanofi sees it differently, but the account raises a question worth asking about any restructuring. When a position disappears from an already overwhelmed team, the work doesn’t vanish. It lands on colleagues or contractors. As we’ve seen across the economy, from Microsoft’s 60,000 buyout offers to Amazon’s plan to grow without hiring, a smaller payroll and less work aren’t the same thing.

The Sanofi employee got what many would call a good exit: a generous severance package, career coaching and résumé help. It got them interviews, but not a job. In comments to BioSpace this August, more than a year after the layoff, they were still unemployed, describing openings that disappeared and hiring managers who promised follow-up conversations that never came. Severance can soften the landing. It can’t create openings or make employers call back.

Six months of pay, six months to find work. The third account came from a principal scientist with about a decade at a major drug company. He lost his job in March when the company scaled back his research area, closed two departments and consolidated work elsewhere. He didn’t mind hearing the news in a group announcement, though he wishes he’d been in the room with colleagues instead of at home. His frustration was that the company never announced the cuts publicly, which made him feel it wanted to avoid attention. Financially, he did better than most: about 10 weeks of salary plus extra pay for tenure and age, unused vacation and health coverage, nearly six months of pay in all. He applied to 20 to 30 jobs, focused on smaller biotech companies and landed one after about six months. Even with all that support and experience, it still took half a year.

None of this proves every pharma layoff is mishandled or that these companies lacked real business reasons. Drug companies face shifting research priorities, regulatory demands and cost pressure, and restructuring can keep a company viable. But the accounts show who absorbs the consequences. Companies describe cuts in terms of projections and efficiency. Workers live them as lost income, lost health coverage and long stretches of uncertainty. The typical stretch of unemployment has grown to 11.5 weeks, as we reported in our guide on what to do before layoffs reach your company. For specialized workers, finding a comparable job can mean moving or changing fields entirely.

There’s no painless way to end someone’s job. But these workers drew a clear line between the business decision and how they were treated. One needed a phone call that never came. Another needed someone to account for the work left behind. The third needed the time severance bought him. For employers, accountability should go beyond the number of jobs cut and the savings expected. It means telling people directly, explaining decisions honestly and recognizing that recovery takes far longer than a restructuring does. And if you’re on the other side of a layoff right now, here’s how to recover when the job market isn’t on your side.

Companies can finish a restructuring in weeks. Workers can spend years recovering from it.