A lay off by any other name
Lori Borgman | Monday, July 20, 2009
The only thing harder than keeping a job these
days is to lose one straight up. People are getting fired, cut and
canned, but businesses can’t bring themselves to say so.
When a company in the Pacific Northwest that makes
scanners for supermarkets cut 89 jobs, the CEO described it as a
“permanent reduction in force” and “a restructuring of the company’s
global presence.”
If I was one of the people losing my job, I’d
hope the president would have enough stripes in his bar code to
tell me I was being laid off as opposed to some blah, blah about
restructuring a global presence.
When Caterpillar chopped 22,000 jobs, the chief
executive said, “It is now clear that we need to sharply lower our
production and costs.”
I would like it if the boss man stood on a backhoe
loader and said, “This is the lowest day of my life.” I would appreciate
it if his chin quivered, he choked up and had to excuse himself
to the men’s room.
American Express announced a “reengineering initiative”
that would generate an $800 million cost benefit. It all sounded
fabulous until you read the reengineering included “a reduction
of staffing levels.”
The husband’s company has made round after round
of layoffs, the most recent being last week. He wondered if this
round might happen like the preliminaries in American Idol. People
who go into one room are told they get to keep their jobs and people
who go into another room are greeted by Simon Cowell and given one
box and one hour to clear out.
When IBM laid off more than 1,600 employees in
the Global Businesses Service Unit, they called it a “large round
of anticipated cuts.” I could live with that, a cut is a classy
way to go.
I was laid off of one of my first newspaper jobs
at a small weekly many black and white broadsheets ago. An hour
before deadline the publisher announced that the paper was going
under due to the rising cost of newsprint and the Canadian paper
mill strike.
One of the pressmen turned beet red, a couple
of the older ladies cried and the bookkeeper slammed file drawers.
By noon everyone had made it to the break room to say unkind things
about the publisher, particularly noting his pasty skin, beady eyes
and red hair.
In truth, the owner had been direct and honest,
which is the best you can do in a bad situation.
Microsoft and Google both had the gigabytes to
call their layoffs layoffs.
Nokia announced it would be "scaling" sales and
marketing to "match the pruned portfolio and global consumer demand."
With all the reductions and pruning going on you don’t know if executives
are stirring a sauce on the stovetop or cutting back lilac bushes
Just once I’d like to hear a CEO of a mismanaged
company say, “I am standing here today because we have been greedy
hogs slobbering at the trough. We pimped out our industry to pointy-headed
business types who didn’t know squat about our product and our market.
We took bad risks, incurred ridiculous debt and now you’re going
to pay for our foolishness.”
A speech like that wouldn’t really help if you
were one being downsized, reduced or pruned – but it sure would
be refreshing to hear.
