With the end of the first quarter of the 2009 almost here, even the strongest companies companies are making last-minute layoffs to shave costs. Today, layoffs were announced across the tech sector, from IBM to Google to Amazon. The biggest layoffs came from IBM, where 5,000 people are losing their jobs in the U.S.. Amazon cut 210 people at three distribution centers in Nevada, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Google also announced layoffs of 200 people from sales and marketing (so far, engineers have been spared). In all three cases, the job cuts amounted to roughly one percent of each company’s global workforce. The New York Times also announced a 5 percent cut of its newsroom business operations, or 100 people.
It is not as if the payroll reductions will help save the quarter or even have a material impact on it. But the companies can point to the measures during their conference calls with investors and analysts and project the savings going forward.
We’ve added the job cuts to our Layoff Tracker. To see who is hiring, check out our CrunchBoard.
- Total Layoffs Since August 27, 2008: 448
- Total Employees: 316,246
| Company | Date | Location | # | % | Source |
| Amazon | March 26, 2009 | Red Rock, Nev.; Munster, Ind.; and Chambersburg, Pa. | 210 | 1% | NYT |
| The New York Times | March 26, 2009 | New York, NY | 100 | 5% | NYT |
| March 26, 2009 | Mountain View, CA | 200 | 1% | NYT |
|
| IBM | March 26, 2009 | USA | 5,000 | 1% | LA Times |
| Imeem | March 25, 2009 | San Francisco, CA | 6 | 4% | TechCrunch |
The irony is that they are laying off people to try and look good for their quarterly results in front of a financial market that is nothing but corrupt.
I wonder how many people they’d lay off id their management could be focusing on 1-2 year goals and predictions instead of the quarterly poker game with the wall street mafia.
W wallsterrt ell, I guess they wanted to play the game so now they have to come to the table whenever Wallstreet asks to see the cards.
Maybe those poor employees will take that aspect into consideration next time they decide between going to work for a large corporation or a small business.
As the article stated the following: “It is not as if the payroll reductions will help save the quarter or even have a material impact on it.”
I agree with that fact. I don’t think companies such as IBM and Google magnitude got up and decided to lay off people to make “try “their numbers look good for the end of the quarter.
I don’t know what the actual cost for 1% of their workforce is actually is, but I am pretty certain that if they were falling short, more than 1% of their workforce would be unemployed right now.
As the article suggested, “the companies can point to the measures during their conference calls with investors and analysts and project the savings going forward”.
In my opinion, this initiative could have been in the works for sometime, and did not come as a surprise to some, if not most. The end of the quarter probably just seemed like “the” right time. Hopefully those poor people had some sort of a notice, as well as a decent severance package.
My apologies, my browser bugged out and posted before I finished editing. My second paragraph should read:
“I agree with that fact. I don’t think companies such as IBM and Google simply decided to lay off people to “try“ and make their numbers look good for the end of the quarter.”
Thanks.
The irony is that they are laying off people to try and look good with their quarterly results in front of a financial market that is nothing but corrupt.
I wonder how many people they’d lay off if their management could be focusing on 1-2 year goals and predictions instead of the quarterly poker game with the wall street mafia.
Well, I guess they wanted to play the game so now they have to come to the table whenever Wallstreet asks to see the cards.
Maybe those poor employees will take that aspect into consideration next time they decide between going to work for a large corporation vs. a small business.
commenting doesn’t seem to wrok.
Your hyperlink to the amazon article seems to be missing the letter “e” on people
It is amazing seeing Google lay off.
I thought these companies are going great, it’s sad that they are laying people off. I don’t know where the economy is going but I hope it gets back to track.
Mohammad Afaq
Free Website Traffic
Actually, a company that had just had layoffs is doing better than before (financially speaking).
Don’t mind us, it’s the money talking.
If these companies have confidence that the economy is on the rebound you would think they would want to avoid layoffs. Nothing is more wasteful than going through the trouble of laying off people only to hire them back later. With the exception of IBM, something is mysteriously wrong with putting such a small percentage of your workforce on the street. That is unless these companies are just looking for an excuse to shed employees who are under-performing. It would be unnerving if the executives of these companies thought so little of the employees that make them great.
As you can read in the article, you would see that these layoffs mostly affect people who are considered as to be a part of ‘overhead costs’. Clearly sales and marketing people are not nearly as costly (and worthy) for Google as engineers in terms of in-house training and therefore they are been laid off.
I see exactly why all five companies did what they did. They had to keep in mind the long-term effects on their investors. If such actions were not taken then the investors could, in the end, could opt to leave costing all five of them long-term funding.
Google?
Amazon isn’t laying them off for layoff’s sake. They’re just closing three fulfillment centers and giving the employees of those centers offers to work at other FCs.
These people (potentially) still have jobs.
My friend Flint who is an enthusiastic guy has developed a site called http://money-ma....synthasite.com which has information about sites where you could make money and you could get his advise on them. He has written every single word on the site by his life experience.
It was only a matter of time. Everyone has been hit.
This only shows that America’s economic woes is far from over. Perhaps the worst is yet to come? God bless America.
http://axees.ea....clickbank.net/
I remember Amazon had its best financial year yet in 2008. Why are they laying people off??
Re: NYT….that’s no shocker…..print newspapers are gone, baby, gone…..at least in their current high overhead form.
I have written about IBM cutting 5000 jobs in USA in my blog: http://www.sout...business-sense/
It makes good sense for IBM because the company is working on the non-US markets very seriously. It now earns around $1 billion from the Indian market and China also looks to be promising. In fact, this move by IBM has hardly anything to do with the economic recession as the plan to expand in Asia was announced in 2006-2007.