Good column from the San Jose Mercury News:
Cassidy: Are layoffs wrong? We should at least be asking the question
By Mike Cassidy
There is plenty to worry about in the current economic calamity, but the thing I’ve been worrying about lately is whether we’ve lost the ability to see layoffs as the tragedy they truly are.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I think it’s time we have a conversation about people losing their jobs. Millions of people. Thousands every day. A real conversation, one in which layoffs are not seen as a business tool or something that just happens when times get tough.
How do we get back to a conversation about how layoffs are bad? About how they are damaging? About how they destroy families and communities? How do we get back to a conversation in which layoffs are seen as a last resort and not a first response, in which no executive uses “layoffs” and “it is what it is” in the same breath?
How do we get back to thinking that a business that lays off its workers is a failure, not an innovator?
I don’t mean to be hopelessly naive. I understand that at times, in the interest of survival or reinvention, companies must pare down or realign their work forces. I know that this is one of the worst economies since the Great Depression. I realize that California’s 11 percent unemployment rate is nothing but a blip compared with the 25 percent rate in the 1930s.
But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the way massive job losses, including from profitable companies with extravagantly paid executives, are choking the life out of our economy and
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our communities. People who don’t work don’t buy things or keep current on their mortgages. Stores close. Homes go vacant. Neighborhoods and commercial districts shrivel up.That is not to say the conversation isn’t happening on a small scale. It’s going on at kitchen tables and side by side in bed, damp eyes staring at the ceiling. What are we going to do? How long can we last? What do we tell the kids? Should we wait until school is out?
But there is a certain detachment in news reports of the latest company cutting payroll to increase profits “going forward.” Cue the grim-faced executive saying it’s painful, without saying for whom, and then asking, “What choice did we have?”
The question shouldn’t be rhetorical. It should be put to business leaders by the press and politicians. We should all be talking about it. Isn’t there another way?
It is both a cliché and a truth that there is a person, a life, sometimes a family, behind every tick up in that unemployment rate. Some had the good sense or good fortune to be ready. They’ve got a few months of mortgage or rent payments saved, and a friend or two who can put in a word or pass along a résumé.
Others are shattered, lost, separated from the very thing that went a ways toward defining who they are. Some are left utterly alone, afraid and hopeless.
Some do well
Today, the Mercury News publishes its annual “What the Boss Makes” survey and, as always, the boss makes plenty. It’s a reminder that even in the worst of times many do very well. The same goes for companies.
Unfortunately, the current downturn is a reminder that just because a company and its executives do well, it doesn’t necessarily follow that those working for them do well, too.
Last quarter, Hewlett-Packard racked up $1.7 billion in profit and announced it would lay off 6,400 workers. It’s only one of many examples of profitable companies shedding workers, but it’s the one that started me thinking about how acceptable layoffs have become.
Analysts and the company could explain: What sounds like a good quarter to many was a bad quarter to HP. Profit was down 17 percent from the year before. And the company needed to match skills with new strategies. Think of it as the new normal in hard times.
For more than a month now, union janitors have been taking turns camping outside of Cisco Systems’ headquarters to protest the layoff of 75 people who cleaned the networking giant’s buildings. They argue that a company that touts expansion plans, has $34 billion in cash on hand and paid its CEO $18.8 million last year shouldn’t stand by while $12-an-hour workers are let go by the contractor Cisco hired to work on its campus.
Debt to workers?
No doubt there is great disagreement about whether the layoffs at HP and Cisco were just or fair. But can’t we agree that we should at least be asking the question? What does a company that makes billions in profit owe its workers? Does it owe them anything?
And looking at the list of the bosses and what they make, shouldn’t we ask whether it’s morally defensible for a top executive to accept tens of millions in pay while he is destroying the lives of his workers? Can a chief executive who is set for life really understand what it’s like to face the loss of your job, home and self-respect?
These are issues that don’t come with one right or easy answer. But I can’t help thinking that we are all diminished if we don’t at least bother to ask the questions.
Contact Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5536.
