THE Let the worldwide layoffs begin Thread pt 2 (merged)

[Tanada]

They were celebrating on the news earlier today, after the worst February house sales ever recorded March was way up. Guess that is supposed to imply we can all run out and get jobs in Construction or something, but you sure don't see any good signs here in Michigan yet.

[Cyrus]

Drugmaker Pfizer has said it is to cut 6,000 jobs worldwide - almost a fifth of its workforce - over the next five years as part of a major restructuring.

It will close eight plants and scale back operations at six other factories. The changes follow Pfizer's purchase of rival Wyeth last year.

Three plants will be closed in the Irish Republic, leading to the loss of up to 785 jobs there.

Two Pfizer plants in County Cork will close and a factory in south Dublin.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/10122544.stm

[efarmer]

Even Viagra has come up against some very stiff competition. Many of the patents
are expiring now and this changes the picture greatly.

[Timo]

Even Viagra has come up against some very stiff competition.

That just has to be a joke! Anything combining "Viagra" and "stiff" in the same sentence can't be taken too seriously. Although, it is a pretty clever use of words to make your point. Very punny!

[Sixstrings]

A grim fact of the recession is that it pays to lay people off.

The CEOs who laid off the most employees during the recession are also the CEOs who took home the biggest pay checks, according to a study released last week.

CEOs of the 50 U.S. firms that slashed the most jobs between November 2008 and April 2010 took in 42 percent more than the average CEO at an S&P 500 firm, according to the 17th annual Executive Excess study by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington think tank.

The study (PDF) also found that 36 of the 50 layoff leaders "announced their mass layoffs at a time of positive earnings reports," suggesting a trend of "squeezing workers to boost profits and maintain high CEO pay."

The 10 "highest-paid CEO layoff leaders" ranked in the report include the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Mark Hurd, who earned $24.2 million in 2009 as the company laid off 6,400 workers and Walmart CEO Michael Duke, who earned $19.2 million as the company laid off 13,350 workers. No Wall Street banks were included in this list, but three banks -- Citigroup, Bank Of America and JP Morgan -- showed up on the study's list of the 50 firms that laid off the most employees.

Overall, the study found that executive pay remains astronomically high compared to previous decades. "After adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-20th century," the study says. Currently, CEOs of major U.S. companies average 263 times the average compensation of American workers, the study claims.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/01/ceo-pay-layoffs_n_701908.html

Gee, what a coincidence -- there's a direct correlation between the most astronomically high CEO pay and who lays the most people off.

[Pretorian]

Well why it does make perfect sense. CEOs, in general, get paid according to the performance of the company that they are CEOing. Contrary to the popular belief, there are a lot , a lot of people hired in a private sector that do nothing, just like their colleagues in the governmental sector. And the bigger the company the more human ballast they have. So obviously the company will perform better once they are gone, hence bonuses.

[efarmer]

Tough economic times are opportune to cut human ballast and to also steal human plums.
The shock wave from a ballast cut is usually accompanied by a kiss to each of the plums that remain.

[Sixstrings]

Well why it does make perfect sense. CEOs, in general, get paid according to the performance of the company that they are CEOing. Contrary to the popular belief, there are a lot , a lot of people hired in a private sector that do nothing..

Well, you'd just think that if the company has to cut back and make personnel sacrifices then maybe the CEO who's gettin 400 times the workers' pay should make a sacrifice too?

Yeah yeah I know, I'm being naive again.

[Ludi]

maybe the CEO who's gettin 400 times the workers' pay should make a sacrifice too?

But he works 400 times harder than any other employee! Didn't you know?

How can he stand to take a pay cut when he's working so hard????

[Pretorian]

Well why it does make perfect sense. CEOs, in general, get paid according to the performance of the company that they are CEOing. Contrary to the popular belief, there are a lot , a lot of people hired in a private sector that do nothing..

Well, you'd just think that if the company has to cut back and make personnel sacrifices then maybe the CEO who's gettin 400 times the workers' pay should make a sacrifice too?

Yeah yeah I know, I'm being naive again.

You mean, out of solidarity? Things like that are done for publicity reasons when there are major paycuts throughout the company. But if there are no paycuts why care? So a fired guy will feel better by having his ex-CEO having 1 million less of an income?

[Pretorian]

maybe the CEO who's gettin 400 times the workers' pay should make a sacrifice too?

But he works 400 times harder than any other employee! Didn't you know?

How can he stand to take a pay cut when he's working so hard????

he doesnt but it is probably well over 400 times as difficult to get a job like that. Jobs that are hard to get tend to be good ones.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Well why it does make perfect sense. CEOs, in general, get paid according to the performance of the company that they are CEOing. Contrary to the popular belief, there are a lot , a lot of people hired in a private sector that do nothing, just like their colleagues in the governmental sector. And the bigger the company the more human ballast they have. So obviously the company will perform better once they are gone, hence bonuses.

That's how it SHOULD work. Lately that relationship seems sadly random for CEO's. Example: huge golden parachutes for being fired when the company performs badly and the stock tanks. (Big reward for success -- downside should be big risk for failure and they should get NO bonus OR salary when they royally screw up, IMO).

Also, I suspect some of this is that companies that want to lay off a lot of folks may hire a "hit man" CEO to take all the blame (credit), and get paid a huge salary/bonus for doing the dirty work.

IBM's Louis Gerstner comes to mind. As an IBMer, overall, I didn't have too big a problem with that, as during Gerstner's tenure, at least (generally) the least productive folks were those tending to get cut. (After that they just started cutting everywhere by quotas, even folks who were performaning well in areas with too much work). He was essentially ending a long period of corporate culture, where IBM would just carry under/non performers in the name of "respect for the individual".

What really fried my gizzard was when he left IBM, Gerstner then wrote a book where he took ALL the credit for IBM's progress during his tenure. Yes, the 300,000+ folks building software/machines (often working every night/weekend for no extra pay) had NOTHING to do with that -- it was all Gerstner. He should have just kept his big bonus and kept his egotistical trap shut, IMO.

edit - finger check in egotistical.

[jbrovont]

There's a concise, way to express why this doesn't sit well with many people.

A main pillar of leadership is "Never ask anyone else to do that which you are unwilling to do yourself." If you won't take a pay cut to protect the health of your common venture (your company) don't ask anyone else to, or no one will respect you. Simple human nature - it's the same reason you don't see a fat, out of shape drill instructor running a squad of rangers on a 20 mile hike from a golf cart: action is proof of desire for humans. If a CEO is content to sit at the top lapping up a paycheck, so shall all their employees report to work simply to punch the clock and do the least they can. Work hard to create value to close a budget gap, and you can expect the people who work for you to do the same. Exploit your position in your environment to extract the most wealth for yourself with disregard for the welfare of the people you're charged with, and, well, you get the idea.

[Pretorian]

Well why it does make perfect sense. CEOs, in general, get paid according to the performance of the company that they are CEOing. Contrary to the popular belief, there are a lot , a lot of people hired in a private sector that do nothing, just like their colleagues in the governmental sector. And the bigger the company the more human ballast they have. So obviously the company will perform better once they are gone, hence bonuses.

That's how it SHOULD work. Lately that relationship seems sadly random for CEO's. Example: huge golden parachutes for being fired when the company performs badly and the stock tanks. (Big reward for success -- downside should be big risk for failure and they should get NO bonus OR salary when they royally screw up, IMO).

i agree. why this is not enforced by stockholders is beyond me

[Vogelzang]

Vote Republican, lower unemployment and solve the energy crisis.

[eXpat]

Global unemployment has reached dangerous levels, ILO report shows

ILO data provides an alarming picture of joblessness, especially among the young, that surely threatens more political instability
A jobless recovery. Entrenched levels of high unemployment among the young. More than 1.5 billion people – half the global working population – in vulnerable or insecure jobs.

Those are the key findings of the latest health check on employment trends across the world released by the International Labour Organisation last night.

The ILO report makes depressing reading. Despite a relatively robust pick-up in growth during 2010, economic recovery made virtually no dent in the unemployment caused by the worst recession in the global economy since world war two. The official jobless figure stood at 205 million in 2010, but that is almost certainly an underestimate since many of those who would like a job have given up hope of finding one, while millions more are working part-time when they would prefer full-time employment.

At 6.2%, the global unemployment rate doesn't sound that alarming, but the overall figure conceals some worrying trends. Although the developed economies of the west account for only 15% of the earth's working population, they accounted for 55% of the increase in unemployment between 2007 and 2010. Sir Richard Lambert, the outgoing director-general of the CBI, made a timely intervention on Sunday when he urged the UK government to come up with a more comprehensive strategy for jobs.

Equally unsettling is the outlook for youth unemployment, which the ILO categorises as the number of people aged between 15 and 24 who are actively seeking working but unable to find it. There was a slight reduction in youth unemployment last year from 79.6 million to 77.7 million but the jobless rate for the young still stands at 12.6%.

In some countries, the outlook is even worse. Spain has youth unemployment of 40%, while young people in south-east Asia and the Pacific are 4.7 times more likely to be unemployed as adults. One of the root causes of the revolution in Tunisia was the unrest caused by having a growing number of young people without jobs: the ILO estimates that in north Africa as a whole "an alarming" 23.6% of economically active young people were unemployed in 2010.

Some countries recognise the threat to political stability created by this enforced worklessness. China's ruling elite fears the impact of large-scale joblessness among the young workers attracted into the cities by rapid industrialisation, and has pursued an aggressively expansionary economic policy to ensure that the labour market remains buoyant. In the US, the Federal Reserve has been acting less like a central bank and more like a continent-wide labour exchange, pumping billions of dollars into the US economy through the money creation process known as quantitative easing.

Other countries have yet to face up to the scale of the challenge represented by the ILO's data. Even in normal times, high levels of unemployment – especially among the young – are a headache for policymakers. But these are not normal times.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/25/ilo-high-unemployment-young-global-recession

[jdmartin]

Goodyear to lay off 1,900 workers.
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110211/BUSINESS01/102110331/Goodyear-shutdown-TN-will-cost-1-900-jobs?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|s

[Fishman]

All to be expected with peak oil. Remember all those prep threads from two years ago? Got garden?

[digging]

Of course jobs lost as a part of the machine will keep going up, the machine is running out of energy. All the people moved to the cities over the last 100 years that where most of the unemployment is also. The exodus will begin we need to slow down and spread out plain and simple.

Digging

[eXpat]

Calif city worker facing layoff jumps to his death

COSTA MESA, Calif. – Crisis counselors have been brought in to help stunned co-workers of a Costa Mesa maintenance worker who jumped to his death from the roof of City Hall an hour after he was called in to get his layoff notice.

Huy Pham, 29, jumped off the building at 3:20 p.m. Thursday and was pronounced dead at the scene, Costa Mesa police Lt. Bryan Glass said.

Pham was on a list of more than 200 people — nearly half of the city's workforce — targeted for layoffs in a drastic move to plug a $15 million budget hole. Those who received notices would see their jobs outsourced in six months.

Pham had worked for the city for 4 1/2 years, according to the Orange County Register. He had been at home with a broken ankle and was not supposed to work Thursday but was called in at about 2:30 p.m. to receive his layoff notice, the newspaper said.

"This is a tragic event for the city and all of its employees," Glass told the Register. "The city is concerned for their well-being and making efforts to help them through this."

Costa Mesa is about 40 miles south of Los Angeles

Huy Pham's brother, John Pham, said it was not evident that his brother was in distress.

"When the layoffs were coming, he thought he was probably going to be rehired" by the new contractor, John Pham told the Register. There was no indication Huy Pham was despairing, he said.

layoffs