Game of blame

I was in an operational meeting. I was serving as a domain expert in that meeting. Other attendees in the meeting were people from management and higher up, who had no domain knowledge. The topic of discussion was how to respond to the escalation received from the client and which action should be proposed as a preventive action.
The project manager asked, " do we have anybody who has resigned? "
" Yes we have two associates and 3 quality reviews who have resigned," thr team manager responded.
" Fantastic that is our solution. Let's inform the client that because of these five people the quality had dipped. As a preventive measure we are removing these five people from the project. There is no need for any further action. We will off board them and we will ask them for their early release. It is of win win for everyone," the project manager replied as if he had come up with the cure for cancer and would get the Nobel award for it.
Everybody in that room was delighted because they have finally found the solution for the pressing issue. It looked like the easy solution and an easy way to save the project. I was the only one in that room who both neither delighted nor found it to be ethical. Yet I knew very well this is how corporate functions.

It was neither the first not the last instance where I saw how the management throws the associates under the bus. People who are serving the notice period would always be the easy targets. They are anyway leaving so it becomes easier to blame them for everything. Once the leave the company it becomes even easier because they are not present to different themselves.

I have often heard managers believing the employees that have left the project or company making them the scapegoats. Forget about others but it happened with me as well. I had left a project and my position was replaced by a friend of mine. A few months later when I met my friend he told me how I was being blamed for everything that went wrong in the project. He told me that my name still appeared in the meeting room whenever client pointed out any error. The management was always ready to throw around my name. It was the client that finally came in my defence. The client told them that they had seen my work during the project and they did not believe that all these errors could have been created or causef because of me. My friend said that it was the moment when the management did not have any answer and everybody new that the project would go soon.

This is one of the lessons that I learnt from my corporate career. know that your name can be tarnished at any point of time even without the reason. Be aware that once you leave the project or the organisation you will be blamed for everything that goes wrong.