Timesizing® Associates

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Downsizings in June/2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 117, Harvard Square, Cambridge MA 02238 USA (617) 623-8080

6/30/2000  3 downsizings reported, totaling 460 +unspecified lost jobs -

1. Potlatch to lay off 260 and take $16 m charge, Bloomberg via NYT, C3.
   ...A [Spokane-based] maker of tissue paper and lumber said yesterday that it would lay off...about 3.7% of its workforce as it struggles to meet profit forecasts. Potlatch, which had 7,000 employees as of Dec., will take a 2nd-quarter charge of...55 cents a share to cover the costs of the job cuts....

2. Qualcomm plans layoff, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, C2.
   ...[The developer of] mobile-phone technology used by 57m people said it's firing about 200 employees, or about 3% of its workforce, a day after the company warned chip sales may slow. Qualcomm began notifying the workers of the cuts in technical, professional, and administrative jobs.... More than 90% of jobs being cut are in San Diego, where Qualcomm is based....

3. Group home to close sooner, by Shaila Dewan, NYT, A23.
   Pacific House, a nonprofit home for the mentally ill in Brooklyn, is closing its doors after nine years amid a host of financial problems and citations for unsanitary conditions and inadequate care....

1. [unspecified jobcuts]
   Italy: State company closes, by Alessandra Stanley, NYT, A6.
   Italy closed a chapter of its modern history by shutting down I.R.I., the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, a state holding company founded under Mussolini.
   [This must be comparable to the USA keeping alive the NIRA from the 1930s and just now shutting it down.]
   At its peak in the 1960's, IRI employed 600,000 people and controlled, among other assets, major shipping lines, Alitalia Airlines and R.A.I., the state television company. By 1997, IRI carried a $12B debt, and was given three years by the treasury to sell off its holdings and go out of business.

2. [unspecified jobcuts]
   Mazda reported to be mulling N. America cuts, Reuters via Boston Globe, D15.
   TOKYO - Mazda Motor Corp., the Japanese affiliate of Ford Motor Co., said yesterday it may close up to 40% of its North American dealership outlets. Japanese business daily the Nihon Keizai Shimbun quoted company president Mark Fields as saying in an interview it would cut the number of outlets to between 550 and 600 over three years...focusing on unprofitable outlets..\..from the current 929.... The company did not deny the report....

3. [general]
   Survey says dot-coms lay off 5,400 since Dec., Bloomberg via Boston Globe, D14.
   ...at US companies that sell goods and services over the Internet, according to a survey by the Chicago employment company Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. The cuts came from 59 companies, almost one-third of which have gone out of business, the survey found. The survey was unable to determine how many jobs were once available at the companies.
   [The language here is pretty imprecise. What period are we talking about? Does it start Dec. 1 or Jan. 1? Does it end May 31 or yesterday = June 28, and if the latter, are we taking estimates for the last two days of the month or quitting two days short? Same question applies to the following statement -]
   Just this month, 1,263 jobs have been eliminated at 17 Internet businesses, according to the one-time telephone survey. John Challenger, chief executive of the employment company, said..."It seems as if this sector may have reached this stage faster than any other in recent memory."
   A survey released in April by The Boston Consulting Group for Shop.org, a trade group, indicated there were more than 400 online retailers.

1. Crown Cork and Seal says it will lay off 1,150, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...A leading maker of metal food cans said yesterday that it would lay off 1,150 employees and warned of lower second-quarter profit [over a third lower than] the year-earlier period..\..because of costs for raw goods, price competition and slower sales.... Over the last year, the Philadelphia-based company's shares have fallen 46%.

1. First Union to shut down Money Store, by Patrick McGeehan, NYT, C1.
   Abandoning its longtime strategy of growing by gobbling up banks and financial companies, the First Union Corp. said yesterday that it would close the Money Store lending operation, get out of some businesses and scale back others.
   [At least they're getting out of the braindead mergemergemerge mode. When will Tyco stop?]
   The bank said the overhaul would reduce earnings by $2.8B, most of it stemming from the decision to immediately shut down the Money Store, a second-mortgage lender pitched relentlessly in television ads by the retired baseball players Phil Rizzuto and Jim Palmer.... First Union is closing all 38 of the remaining branches of Money Store, 12 of which are in New Jersey and New York. Money Store also has processing operations in the New Jersey towns of Warren and Pennington....
   ["...decision to immediately shut down the Money Store...." Strange, wonder what spooked them?! ]
   ...In the late 1990's, as other lenders began competing for so-called subprime borrowers, Money Store's customers started repaying their loans early by refinancing them elsewhere. Early repayment is the bane of lenders like Money Store because it decreases the value of a loan that the lender, in turn, has borrowed against to raise money to make more loans. The subprime lending business has been through a classic boom-and-bust cycle on Wall Street in the last several years. After flourishing for a few years, high-risk consumer lending crashed, sending some lenders into bankruptcy and others into the arms of acquirers....
   About 2,350 Money Store employees will lose their jobs, including about 360 in New Jersey, where the operation was founded. First Union, the sixth-biggest bank in the country, bought the Money Store for $2.1B two years ago in one of the last big purchases in a long string of deals engineered by its former chief executive, Edward Crutchfield.
   [With emphasis on the "crutch."]
   Mr. Crutchfield's successor, G. Kennedy Thompson, is repudiating much of that growth strategy [it's not properly growth, it's just acquisition! - ed.] by shrinking the company, which is based in Charlotte, NC, to focus on its core businesses of banking and brokerage.... First Union also plans to sell or close about 90 bank branches, mostly in the Southeast and mid-Atlantic states.

2. Boeing may cut 900 jobs, Bloomberg via NYT, C10.
   HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif...- The Boeing Co. said [yester]day that it planned to cut as many as 900 jobs as it shuts down some of its rocket and aircraft production here. Boeing is shifting work on its Delta rockets to plants in Pueblo, Colo., and Decatur, Ala., where much of the final assembly already takes place. The company is also moving some work on the C-17 transport plane out of Huntington Beach.
   [Hey, at least it's not moving all this work to Mexico - though it probably would if it wasn't work for the US military.]
   Boeing, whose 189,000 employees include 54,000 in California, has said it plans to accelerate a consolidation of its operations this year in hopes of increasing its profits.... Boeing also attributed the job cuts to a decline in demand for rocket launchings after the collapse of satellite projects like Iridium LLC.
   [900 jobs is 0.5% of its whole workforce and 1.7% of its California workforce. What today's CEOs, business schools, and economists don't "get" is that consolidation of operations is consolidation of employment, is consolidation of wages, is consolidation of spending power, is reduction of spending and consumer base and markets.]

• An electronic newsletter rattles and amuses Chicago's start-ups, by David Barboza, NYT, C1, C6.
  
  1. ...The May Report was also the first to report that Divine Interventures, the Internet incubator, was planning a major reorganization with as many as 300 layoffs.... The local papers picked up the story, but Divine said that only 29 employees had been let go, and that Mr. May's report was false....
  2. ...Mr. [Ron] May says he uses the e-mail forum to provide a valuable service to the community. For instance, after he wrote that US at Work laid off much of its staff, he published the email addresses of people who lost their jobs....

1. Pseudo Programs lays off 58 workers, NYT, B2.
   ...An "online TV network" laid off about a quarter [24%] of its staff yesterday, continuing a trend in the Internet industry that began with April's stock market gyrations. Executives at the company's New York offices told 58 of its 240 employees that their services would no longer be needed. Most of the layoffs were from the production side of the operation.
   ...Pseudo...recently raised another $14m from investors.... While acknowledging that financial pressure in the Internet sector has forced the company to make tighter budgets on the assumption that outside capital could soon dry up, David Bohrman, Pseudo's chief executive, said the company was in overall financial health and that it was due for a reorganization anyway.
   [So are today's B-schools teaching that CEOs should have layoffs on a regular schedule - perhaps just to "discipline the workforce"? This company is aptly named - Pseudo means "phony" in Greek.]
   He said he planned to create 20 new positions in the near future, so that the net reduction in staff would be 16%.
   [Not so fast, pal. To paraphrase Ross Perot, if your own employees can't trust you, how can we? If you have so little respect for yourself and your closest colleagues that you'd rather jerk around firing and rehiring instead of "everyone sacrificing together, starting at the top" - like Lincoln Electric - we have no guarantees that the survivors aren't going to become "the walking wounded" and pull down your overall efficiency so much that you'll never recover.
   [But isn't downsizing really a great non-confrontational way to get rid of unproductive or disruptive employees, who might go after executives or pursue interminable lawsuits if handled on a case-by-case basis? We quote the Great Manager himself, "...The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather the tares up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye gather up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest...." Matt. 13:28-30.
   [So is Phil Hyde some kind of "Bible-quothing" religious nut? Phil Hyde is somebody with a long view, who realizes that any society is built on ideals, and we violate those ideals at our peril. Put another way, any society is built on sharing, and if today's CEOs don't want to share the fate of their employees, for good or ill, they don't have a real company and they're not real CEOs. And it ain't just the JudeoChristians who learned this the hard way (and we're talking centuries of experience in H.R. and people management, not just the few years since the last management fad) - the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu came up with it too, "If you would rule the empire, you must experience the worst the empire has to offer." This is just simple cybernetics. If you can't feel the problems, you don't have a feedback system. And if you've insulated yourself so you just observe the problems but you direct the damage away from yourself onto others, sorry, you ain't really feeling the problems - you're just playing god, and we're not talking about the empathic self-sacrificing God of the JudeoChristian tradition, but some cruel (and rather self-contemptuous and self-destructive) caricature. In a labor glutted, pre-Depression, pre-war period like today, gratuitous cruelty abounds. And it's not started by the followers. It's started by leaders who don't deserve the name. It's not the "working classes" who declare "class warfare" although they're immediately accused of it - it's the spoiled, perspective-lacking, shortsighted, insulated, isolated wealthy. But fear not, a better way is at hand - Timesizing.]

2. Bankruptcy protection sought, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, C1.
   ...Maurice Corp., a private New England retail clothing chain...based in Portsmouth, NH, and trading as The Pants Man ...plans to liquidate most of its merchandise and close almost all of its 50 stores. Maurice officials are negotiating to sell some stores....

1. Aventis, NYT, C4.
   ...France's largest drug maker, said it would shut its Virogenetics vaccine-research laboratory in Troy, NY, because the cost of operating the 26-worker site had become too high. The Virogenetics research will be moved to the Aventis Pasteur laboratory in Toronto.

2. Alliances and mergers among entertainment marketers to bring changes to theater business, by Stuart Elliott, NYT, C5.
   ...And Wilner Advertising in New York, a Broadway show specialist, is closing....

1. Uranium enrichment plant in Ohio chosen for closing - But decision is criticized in Washington - The privatization of a cold war business has been difficult, by Matthew Wald, NYT, C22.
   The private company that runs the nation's only two uranium enrichment plants said today that it would close one of them in a year, in Portsmouth, Ohio, because of high costs and a depressed market for reactor fuel.... The decision...would eliminate about 1,000 jobs..\.. The other plant, which is in Paducah, Ky., would remain open....
   [So, guess this would be about a 50% layoff.]
   The decision...drew criticism from Congress. The Energy Dept., which sold the plants two years ago, has asked pointed questions recently about whether a shutdown is advisable.
   [Hey, "if you want it done right, do it yourself." Let those who want to privatize social security take notice.]
   Under the privatization law, the plants were supposed to remain open until 2004, but there was an escape clause if the private entity, the United States Enrichment Corp., fell into financial difficulties. The Bethesda, Md., company told the Treasury Dept. earlier this week that it had done exactly that....

2. www.layoffs.com - Internet work force has its first brush with downsizing, by Matt Richtel, NYT, C1.
   [The chart lists three downsizings that we haven't picked up, totaling 285 lost jobs -]
   
   1. DEN.net, 200 laid off = 100% of workforce [entertainment]
   2. Living.com, 50 laid off = 13% of workforce
   3. ThirdAge Media, 35 laid off = 25% of workforce
   [The chart also lists seven downsizing that we have picked up: APBnews.com, toysmart.com, InsWeb, DrKoop.com, CarOrder.com, Salon.com, AltaVista. And our summary on 5/23/00 under Toysmart.com lists the following additional dot-coms in financial difficulty: RedRocket.com, Cybershop.com, NatureCompany.com, MyWay.com, Cozone.com, Boo.com, Craftshop.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and depending on your confidence/credulity levels, Amazon.com itself with its ongoing red ink (but it's all planned so it's supposedly OK).]

1. More job cuts in Britain, by Alan Cowell, NYT, B2.
   Adding to a wave of job losses, Corus Group PLC, Europe's No. 2 steel maker, will cut 1,430 jobs - 4% of its work force in Britain. Corus was formed last year by the merger of British Steel PLC and Koninklijke Hoogevens of the Netherlands. The cuts were seen as a result of export losses caused by Britain's strong pound.
   [But there's still the takeover-downsizing connection in the background, as short-term smart, long-term suicidal management keeps bashing its consumer base and constricting the spending power that supports it.]

2. Wal-Mart layoffs approaching 'critical mass' for over-worked workers, says UFCW, Business Wire via AOLNews via RadioTony, 16 Jun 2000 18:16:07 EDT.
   ...The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) has been told of...layoffs...in [Wal-Mart's] retail and wholesale club stores...and cutbacks [in hours] from employees in all geographic regions and from all divisions of the company.... "The Internet is crackling with angry and concerned messages from Wal-Mart workers. We're certainly getting numerous inquiries on the UFCW's Web sites," said Michael Leonard, a VP of the UFCW and director of strategic programs. "The fact that Wal-Mart has not publicly released details...is feeding employee resentment and concern.... Wal-Mart routinely sends employees home early if a store's sales are not meeting arbitrary projections, but the current round of layoffs and hours reductions appear far more widespread than isolated sales problems in individual stores or geographic areas."
   [Well, at least they do some timesizing.]
   The layoffs and cutbacks followed recent news reports of sluggish June retail sales, "but that explanation doesn't wash with employees whose hours are already cut even though the stores are busy," Leonard, a 36-year veteran of the retail industry, claimed. "Anyone who works in retail understands the ebb and flow of sales, and the maxim that employees treat customers the same way they are treated by the company. Sam Walton [Wal-Mart's founder] knew that, but apparently his successors don't....
   [Never heard that one, but it sounds like a good maxim.]
   "Bentonville [Wal-Mart's HQ town] is so driven by the demands of Wall Street that they've lost sight of consumer and employee satisfaction," the union organizer added. "The excessive demands on employees to do more to cover for laid-off co-workers and the added pressure brought by surly customers frustrated with protracted delays in check-out lines are reaching a critical mass. It is only a matter of time before it explodes into a wildfire of union activity."
   Union officials report receiving the following anecdotes from employees:
   
   • ..\..One of the company's supercenters, plagued by customer complaints about long checkout lines, laid off 14 cashiers recently hired to alleviate the problem.
   • ...In a Texas store a 10-year employee with numerous customer commendations was laid off.
   • ...A South Carolina store laid off 52 employees....
   • Rather than following the traditional retail practice of allowing normal attrition to take care of layoffs, many stores are using the layoffs...to trim payrolls by laying off higher-paid employees while still hiring entry-level replacements. \One\ store rehired fired cashiers to save training costs after laying off higher-paid cashiers.
   • Full-time employees [are] having their hours cut to 20 and part-timers...to one day a week. Employees are being asked to "volunteer" to get off early; or to "sacrifice" to keep the stock price from dropping....
   [So let's see, aside from unreported layoffs, we have mention here of 14+1+52= 67 layoffs.]
   ..."[Despite an] Open Door Policy [to management,] management refuses to level with its 'associates'..\..as it calls employees...about what is happening," Leonard added. "The employees can't talk with management about this, so they are coming to the union in droves."
   [Lesson for management - if you want to keep out unions, keep open the lines of communication with your employees. Insecure, defensive and uncommunicative management is probably the biggest reason there is for unions.]
   ...Leonard said that the union has no way to independently verify the rash of current Wal-Mart layoffs and cutbacks, but he attributed the increased confidence of employees in contacting the UFCW...to recent steps the union took to guarantee the confidentiality of employee contacts with the union's two principal Web sites... www.ufcw.org \and\ www.walmartyrs.org. For more information, contact Greg Denier at 202\223-3111 or email: press@ufcw.org.
   [This gives us some inkling of how few layoffs actually get reported in the NYT and the Boston Globe, or even the newswires.]

3. [10-year overview at one manufacturing plant]
   Union pickets Lynn GE plant, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, C2.
   About 2,000 union workers yesterday demonstrated outside of General Electric's aircraft engine plant in Lynn [Mass.] during a two-hour symbolic strike to protest company demands for concessions and the loss of hundreds of union jobs.... The union, which had close to 9,000 members a decade ago, has watched its numbers decline to just 2,600 at the Lynn plant. The steep loss of jobs likely will be a factor if the company's 14 unions, representing some 36,000 workers nationwide, decide to strike next month.... Meanwhile, unionized GE workers around the country have held rallies in seven cities..\..
   "We want more job security, but they don't want to give it to us," said Ric Cassili, business agent for Local 201 of the International Union of Electrical Workers and a member of its bargaining committee.... Union officials in Lynn said they were seeking...binding arbitration [too].... "They want us to pay more [for health care premiums] but they haven't said how much," said Casilli. "They also want to take away some fo the provisions...in the 1997 contract."
   [Poor modern unions. Their forefathers had the horse sense to offset mechanization by fighting for shorter hours for over a century and a half. This made sure that they would not be marginalized by constant waves of labor-saving technological innovations, as America mechanized first agriculture and then one sector after another of manufacturing. It guaranteed that labor's bargaining power would increase, or at least be maintained. But something went terribly wrong in the 1930s. Labor did not FOCUS and PUSH on shorter hours - on a maximum workshare per person - so the market wouldn't be flooded with desperate discarded workers as America automated. Instead of focusing on greater control of its own aggregate supply - by reducing the workweek, labor allowed "Saint" FDR to divide and distract it with minimum wages and other lollypops. The focused and strategic approach - workshare balancing - was replaced with the scattershot approach - the Great Liberal Grocery List of Goodies - with which labor has been losing ground ever since. And America's consumer base has fallen ever further behind America's productive capacity. (And our record $29B trade deficit undermines the "export solution.")
   [Poor modern unions. This news item still shows them pushing for a child's Xmas list of almost random wants: job security, binding arbitration, stable health insurance premiums, and stable previous levels of contract provisions. Yet the unions at this one plant have lost (9000-2600/9000=) 71% of their membership in the last decade alone, in the middle of a supposedly "booming economy" and during a period of supposedly "low unemployment." Are they ever going to wake up and focus?
   [Poor liberals - they cling to their obsolete want list - health insurance, housing, child care, jobs, job security, higher minimum wages, education, on and on - and they keep losing ground.
   [Poor Ted Kennedy - he clings to the obsolete liberal want list. He gets us more and more government with fewer and fewer results. In the last 30 years since the labor "shortage" (actually a labor-employment balance) of World War II wore off, it's become necessary to have two working parents to support the family. And yet America is still splitting with a wider and wider income gap. And getting record homelessness and incarceration in the midst of a "booming economy" and "low unemployment." Will Ted Kennedy ever wake up and focus?
   [Unless we focus on sharing in the economic realm, and not just in the increasingly money-drowned political realm (one person, one meaningless vote), we will continue our downward spiral toward third-world squalor. Step one in economic sharing is sharing the specialized and fast-changing skills and the vanishing, urgently demanded human employment that doesn't require 90% of a firm's budget for marketing and advertising like the dot-coms. And at the dawn of the Third Millennium, the only complete core design for skill- and employment-sharing on a market-oriented, inflation-resistant basis is Timesizing.]

1. British stores to close, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   A privately held Dutch clothing retailer, C&A, said it was pulling out of Britain after 78 years, closing all 113 stores and cutting 4,800 jobs because of slumping profit and sales. Its British business posted total losses of...$377m over the last 5 years. Most of the British outlets will close at the end of this year.

2. Meritor to lay off 500 and take $26m charge, Dow Jones via NYT, C4.
   ...A maker of automotive systems and components...based in Troy, Mich..\..said yesterday that it planned to...eliminate excess manufacturing capacity in Europe as part of a reorganization that will reduce costs by $21m a year before taxes. ...The layoffs [will] be worldwide and affect all segments of the company, which employs 19,000 people....
   [Let's see, 500/19,000 means a downsizing of 2.6% of the workforce, which could have been merely a company-wide timesizing (downsizing of the workweek) of 2.6%, that is, a mere 1 hour and 3 minutes.]

3. [state & industry overview]
   Textile, apparel jobs fading fast, report says - But sector's still key in some Mass. cities, by Kimberly Blanton, Boston Globe, C4.
   In less than 20 years, the number of textile and apparel employees in Massachusetts has withered by more than half...according to a study published today by U.Mass.Dartmouth.... The state's once-dominant position eroded when [most of] the industry migrated south. But it has shrunk further in recent years...due to...cheap labor overseas. Massachusetts' combined textile-apparel employment plunged...from a high of 65,100 in 1980..\..to 28,700 in 1997 [a drop of 36,400 or 56%].... Textiles and apparel...constitute 6.4% of the state's manufacturing sector, with the jobs concentrated in the Fall River-New Bedford area and in the Merrimack Valley [including] Lawrence and Lowell, according to the report, "Economic Impacts of the Textile and Apparel Industries in Massachusetts".... In Fall River, [25% of] jobs is in textiles and apparel.... The industries account for 8%...in New Bedford..\..and 10% [in] Lawrence. Overseas [apparel] makers have gained control of [50%] of the American...market. [However, overseas] textile firms [have so far gained] less than 10%....
   [It's that "giant sucking sound" - mentioned by Perot - of American jobs leaving the country and sucking the late great USA down to third-world levels. Capitalists used to criticize communists for reducing everybody to the lowest common denominator. Now American businessmen themselves are doing it, with great efficiency, first by using technology to replace people (downsizing) instead of making people's lives easier (timesizing) and second by taking advantage of people's resulting powerlessness to move their jobs overseas. The only problem for American businessmen is that this is steadily damaging the late great American consumer base. So we're now in the classic pre-Depression phase where the only way businessmen can increase their market share is to acquire it by takeovers of rival companies. But they have ever so much money for acquisitions (most followed by further downsizing), because the money that used to be pouring down to their employees and their consumer base and their markets, is now merely trickling down while pouring up to them - a classic investment bubble. They are succeeding in suctioning the markets away from their own investments. And all for lack of guidelines to keep them reinvesting at the necessary levels in their own markets via their own corporate payroll. The Timesizing.com approach identifies the time dimension as the immediate best arena for such reinvestment, and in fact, the incidence of overtime as the market-oriented best targeter of such reinvestment, via training and hiring.]

1. Kaiser Aluminum cutback, Bloomberg via NYT, C10.
   ...The third-largest U.S. aluminum maker said [yester]day that it would dismiss 400 temporary employees at smelting plants in Tacoma and Mead, Wash., as it temporarily cuts capacity because of high power costs....

2. Pacificare Health Systems Inc., NYT, C4.
   ...Santa Ana, Calif., the No. 1 operator of Medicare HMO's, said it would end its managed care operations in Ohio and Kentucky, where it has more than 60,000 customers.

• Sykes sells employee benefits unit in restructuring, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
  Sykes Enterprises, which runs customer-support centers for Microsoft and other companies, is selling its [SHPS] unit for $165.5m in cash to closely held...Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe as part of a reorganization that will include some office closings and the firing of an unspecified number of workers..\.. Sykes also said its 2nd-quarter earnings would not meet analysts' forecasts....
  [Here we have a twist on the frequent takeover-downsizing connection - a company in trouble decides to downsize instead of timesize, and disfigures itself by closing some offices and selling others.]

• Reel.com will close online video operation, Reuters via NYT, C4.
  The Hollywood Entertainment Corp. said yesterday that it would close down its Reel.com online video store after being unable to raise sufficient financing.... It planned to fulfull outstanding movie orders that had been placed through Reel.com.... It had been pleased with the growth in Reel.com's business in terms of revenue and traffic growth but found that the general decline in e-commerce stocks made investors wary.

• Bon-Ton Stores Inc., NYT, B3.
  ...York, Pa., an operator of 72 department stores in New York, Pennsylvania and other Eastern states, said it would cut 187 positions, about 2% of its work force, to reduce costs.

1. British job cuts announced, by Andrew Sorkin, NYT, C4.
   Britain's largest mail-order company, Great Universal Stores PLC, announced it would merge its home shopping unit with its catalog chain unit, Argos. The move is meant to cut costs and will result in the elimination of 800 jobs....

2. Corel to cut jobs, by Timothy Pritchard, NYT, C4.
   A Canadian software maker [in] Ottawa plans to eliminate 320 jobs, or 21% or its work force, as part of its survival strategy after the collapse last month of a proposed merger with the Imprise/Borland Corp. Corel, which has been losing money and had staked its future of the Linux operating system, had hoped to tap $240m from Imprise...to avoid running out of cash....
   [And additional info from the Web -]
   Corel chops 320 jobs in cost-cutting moves, Reuters via AOLNews via RadioTony, Thu, 8 Jun 2000, 18:20:11 EDT
   Beleaguered...Corel Corp...revealed that flamboyant chief executive Michael Cowpland will forgo his salary as part of a plan to cut $40m from annual expenses.
   [Now there's a CEO with extended self-interest - for a change.]
   ...Corel...said the job cuts included employee and contractor terminations and attrition. Employees in all departments were affected....

3. Assisted living facility to close - Fiscal woes beset Back Bay home for the well-heeled [in Boston], by Richard Kindleberger, Boston Globe, C3.
   Burrage House in the Back Bay charges $2600-5800 a month to house and help its frail elderly residents.... The 30-bed assisted-living facility for well-heeled senior citizens will close its doors in 90 days. Benchmark Assisted Living, brought in to run the facility after a new owner took over in August - following the previous owner's bankruptcy - said it would work through the summer to find places for its 14 permanent residents. Three others were temporary....
   Burrage House has 25 to 30 full-time and part-time employees, who will receive help looking for new jobs, said Greg Anderson, a Benchmark spokesman....
   [So splitting the difference, we get 27.5 rounding to 28 employees losing their jobs.]
   The elegant five-story building opened in 1992 as Boston's first assisted-living facility [serving] those who are too frail to live on their own but who don't need a nursing home. ...The original owner, Boston Back Bay Board and Care, borrowed a large amount for ambitious renovations. Then it found itself unable to attract enough residents at high enough rents to pay the debt and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1998....

1. Salon dismisses...workers [same week as CBS Internet division fires 25], by Felicity Barringer, NYT, C8.
   ...[This week] the CBS Internet division in New York dismissed a quarter of its approximately 100 employees....
   [As far as we know, this is the first NYT mention of this downsizing.]

2. Salon.com dismisses 13 workers in effort to fight shortfall - Web magazine is latest to make cutbacks - Financial strains are running through dot.com journalism, by Felicity Barringer, NYT, C8.
   The carnage in the world of Web-based journalism yesterday continued as...one of the highest-profile Web magazines [tried] to make up an expected $7m shortfall in its $35m budget. The magazine...announced cutbacks in the same week that APBNews.com...laid off 140 employees [see story 6/6 below] and the CBS Internet division in New York dismissed a quarter of its approximately 100 employees.... Of the seven editorial employees laid off, three...covered media news. The online competition for that audience ranges from... Inside.com to the Web sites of...Brill's Content, The Iindustry Standard, Editor & Publisher, and...national newspapers.... The criterion for the layoffs...was the number of readers - as measured by hits or page views - and the number of sponsors or advertisers..\..
   David Talbot, Salon.com's founder, said..."The situation is short-term pain which we're going through in exchange for long-term viability"....
   [Don't count on it when you and you're brethren are laying off your own best customers.]
   The news was unnerving for those who had left the familiar confines of old media to join the Web adventure. Mr. Offman, who left a reporter-researcher job at Time magazine to join Salon, said, "You're not held for space, to some extent you don't have to compete to get into the book," a reference to the vicissitudes of journalistic life at Time. "But," he added, referring to the audience counts that lost him his job, "there is some kind of competition going on. It's just not perceptible to the human eye."
   Two of those laid off yesterday, Camille Peri and Kate Moses, the founders of the Mothers Who Think section of the site, are the wives of Mr. Talbot and Salon's executive director, Gary Kamiya, respectively. Asked how he gave his wife the news, Mr. Talbot said, "Very carefully."
   [It takes a really unimaginative employer to cut 100% of the hours of his own wife instead of 9% of the hours of his whole company (3.6 hrs/wk down to a 36.4-hr workweek), including his own, and keep everyone, including his wife, employed. Such is the time blindness of Americans at the dawn of the Third Millennium. The 9% comes from the Boston Globe version of this story -]
   Salon.com to trim 9% of jobs, cut costs, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, F2.
   ...San Francisco-based Salon.com, which has between 140 and 150 employees, also plans to spend less on freelance writers and marketing..\..in a bid to cut expenses by 20% and earn a profit.... The company reported a net loss of $21.9m on sales of $8m in the year ended March 31. Operating expenses came to $30.9m. Salon.com's cost-cutting campaign came as investor enthusiasm has diminished for Internet retailers and media outlets that rely primarily on advertising sales....
   [This must have been how it happened in 1929 - investors realized that with all the layoffs throughout the 1920s as new efficient machinery and assembly lines were introduced into manufacturing, there just wasn't going to be that fast and big a market for the glitzy new radio and automobile productivity. So they stopped investing and triggered the Great Depression. "It wasn't that the money wasn't there. It was there. It just wasn't in play."]
   "We want to guarantee that we have long-term sustainability," said Salon.com chief executive Michael O'Donnell.
   [Suddenly the watchword of ecology, "sustainability," creeps into the speaking vocabulary of the most short-term oriented of people, dot-com executives. "Will wonders never cease!"]
   "The idea of 'spend to glory' is just not viable in today's market."
   [Golly, it isn't?! It sure was for the last 2-3 years! And they were a "permanent plateau of prosperity," weren't they?!]

1. Online news firm fires staff - APBNews.com cites tech-stock plunge, AP via Boston Globe, D9.
   NEW YORK - ...A respected online news company that focuses on crime and the justice system has run out of money and fired its staff. The site will be operated on a limited basis by a handful of volunteers while the owners look for new investors. Chief executive Marshall Davidson announced the news to his 140 employees yesterday.... He said the company was in the midst of its third round of financing in March when the downturn in technology stocks hit, drastically lowering the value of many Internet companies. As a result, the company never raised the money....
   [In other words, the company never raised its third round of charity. After two rounds of financing, if you're still not solvent, maybe you should fold your cards.]
   Spokesman Joe Krakoviak would not discuss the company's financial details, including how much investment cash APBNews.com had gone through. He said the company was continuing talks with several potential [suckers - sorry, that's] partners.

2. Insweb Corp., NYT, C4.
   ...an online insurance marketplace, said it planned to reduce its work force by about 40%, or 120 employees, in the next two quarters and discontinue operations of its Benelytics Inc. unit.

3. Hemagen [Diagnostics] to shutter manufacturing plant, Dow Jones via Boston Globe, D11.
   ...A maker of diagnostic test kits..\..completed a private placement, raising $6.3m, and said it planned to close its Waltham [Mass.] plant [and] relocate portions of the plant's manufacturing to its underused facility in Columbia, Md. [to] further reduce its annual expenses....

1. Cab empire to signal 'off duty' - [Boston's] top medallion firm to sell holdings, by Ronald Rosenberg, Boston Globe, F1.
   ...Carol S. Parks, who owns Checker Cab and Town Taxi in Boston and Red Cab in Brookline, will announce Monday [6/05/00] that she is shutting down the businesses Aug. 7.... Not included in the liquidation are a trio of garages in Boston and in South Brookline, where the companies operate, along with other properties the [Parks] family controls.... Industry sources say Parks owns about 100 Checker medallions and about 100 Town Taxi medallions. (Red Cab is in Brookline, which does not use medallions.)...
   In Brookline, 54 people, including 23 drivers and 7 mechanics, will lose their jobs at Red Cab, said David Robbins, secretary-treasurer for [Teamsters International] Local 504.
   [So 54 jobs lost in Brookline, and unspecified jobs lost in Boston.]
   He said Red Cab, with 115 taxis, is the largest operator in the town, with 65% of all licenses.
   [So Brookline doesn't have medallions, but does have licenses? So what's the diff?! Privately tradeable vs. not? One glimmer of hope in all this -]
   "When those [Boston] medallions are sold, Boston, like no other city, will have more owner-operated cab drivers than companies that own a fleet of taxis and use employee drivers"..\..said Martin J. Callinan, president of the 300-member Independent Taxi Owners Association....

2. Century-old Cambridge store to close - Sage Grocery ending operation in Harvard Square, by Jamal Watson, Boston Globe, B3.
   ...Today...a favorite place for old-timers to grab a tossed salad and sandwich and a bundle of fresh fruit druing their lunch hour will join the lengthening list of Harvard Square casualties, victims of gentrification - and a weakened family tradition. The [Sage] family trust voted to close the door, amid concerns of rapid development throughout the area. The building is slated to be leased later in the year to an unidentified commercial retail outlet.
   "I'm a little disappointed," said Charlie Sage...who wanted to the business to remain at its current location. "Our customers have expressed disappointment and concern that we're leaving. They've told us that we've been an asset to Harvard Square." But other members of the family are adamant that a small-time grocery store in Harvard Square just isn't viable any more. "They view this as more of an investment than a home for a grocery store," Sage said. "I understand that. They feel we should get market rent for the property"....
   [As if the Sage family trust needs more money. Well, this indicates the depth of their values. Selling something irreplaceable for something common - their birthright for a mess of pottage. Another little step on America's assimilation to the 3rd world - boring walled communities of superwealthy in a boring barren landscape of poverty and misery. Because Americans with money and power have lost their mission, their uniqueness, their soul - and just want to see those numbers mount up a little meaningless more. They'll gain the whole world and it will turn to dust in their grasping, boring, bony fingers. "We want no responsibility - just MORE MONEY." Boring losers. Those who shed responsibility soon shed their resources too. Once you break the social contract - and America's wealthy in the last 30 years have been doing it all over the place thanks to our frozen 1940-level workweek, technological displacement and mounting marginalization of labor, training and employment - you hemorrhage control and open a Pandora's box of unpredictabilities.]
   Charlie Sage said that he's working to guarantee that all 20 of his workers will gain employment elsewhere. But Rachel Aslane...of Medford said that a new job just wouldn't be the same. "This place is nice, we're like a family," Aslane said. "I loved serving our customers. They came in here every day; I got to know them." Amid the handshakes and whispered thank you's from faithful shoppers, Charlie Sage is hopeful that the store might find a smaller location that it could afford to rent in the area....
   [And don't the wealthy love to "cry poor." Basically Charlie is getting shafted by the other members of his family, who aren't doing a damn thing but are still resentful that "they're not getting their share" from this potential bonanza in the hottest real estate market in the Athens of America. This is the result of a poorly written will which resulted in one beaver and a number of parasites.]
   "I've been the one in the family who has kept the tradition going," he said. "I've never worked for any else so it's going to be a bit of an adjustment."
   [Did anyone else in the family work at all?]

1. Terra Industries Inc., NYT, C4.
   ...Sioux City, Iowa, a maker of fertilizer, said it would idle its plant in Blytheville, Ark., and would dismiss 70 of the plant's 100 workers because of soaring prices of natural gas, the raw material for its ammonia and urea products.

1. Brown Brothers to cut 78 trader, analyst jobs, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, C7.
   NEW YORK - ...The oldest privately held US bank said it will exit the brokerage business to focus on managing money to wealthy individuals. Brown Brothers, founded in 1818, will fire 78 analysts and support staff from among the 125 people who work in its institutional brokerage business. The job cuts will come in New York, London, and Boston. The firm employs about 2,000.
   The move comes after Brown Brothers' rivals raised pay and sweetened perks to curb turnover, raising the ante for smaller firms....
   [78/2000 = 4% of the workforce.]

2. Metro Information Services Inc., NYT, C4.
   ...Virginia Beach, Va., a software and information technology consulting company, plans to close 8 of its 44 officesand dismiss 25 workers to focus better on its more profitable sites.

3. TandyCrafts Inc., NYT, C4.
   ...Fort Worth, the No. 2 maker of picture frames in the U.S., has closed its frame plant in Van Nuys, Calif. and will shift those operations to Durango, Mexico, to cut costs.

For more details, our laypersons' guide to our great economic future Timesizing, Not Downsizing is available at bookstores in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass. or from *Amazon.com online.

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