Timesizing® Associates

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Downsizings July 16-31/2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 117, Harvard Square, Cambridge MA 02238 USA (617) 623-8080

7/29/2000  4 more downsizings reported, totaling 10,401 lost jobs

1. Bank of America to cut up to 6.7% of work force, or 10,000 jobs, by Diana Henriques, NYT, B1.
   ...over the next year...and use the savings to improve its Internet offerings, promote its brand name and improve services, especially for wealthy individuals.
   [More pathetic faith -
   • that somehow new technology like the Internet can magically create markets, even though CEOs are cutting their markets along with their workforces
   • that somehow a few wealthy people can sustain the whole company, even though 1 person with a million bucks does a lot fewer transactions than 10 people with $100k apiece, let alone 100 people with $10k apiece.... You'd think these dirt-rich CEOs would realize that they're just putting more pressure on themselves by focusing evermore pressure on the wealthy to support the whole economy. This means they themselves are going to get more junk mail, more spam, more telephone marketers, more high pressure sales tactics.... or that their fortresses are going to have to get thicker and thicker walls. Sooner or later we're going to have to update our sharing technology. Easiest is skill and work sharing. Why not sooner?
   And growth? Forget it. Now growth in market share comes only from more acquisitions of rivals. In a pre-depression period, mergers and acquisitions jump, especially in banking.]
   Middle-level and senior managers are expected to be the principal targets of the job cutback, along with workers whose jobs will be erased by new technology.
   [Oh deardear, there must be some mistake! Technology doesn't "erase" jobs. Oh no. "Technology creates more jobs than it destroys"! Everyone knows that!]
   With these new steps, roughly 34,000 jobs will have been eliminated at the bank since September 1998, when it was created by the combination of Nationsbank of Charlotte, NC, and the BankAmerica Corp. of San Francisco.
   [So, let's see. These 34,000 layoffs between 9/98 and 7/00 mean roughly 17,000 layoffs a year over the last two years at this one bank alone. The downsizing hallmark of depression onramps is always much in evidence in the banking industry. We have had roughly 95,000 layoffs a year in U.S. banking alone between 1995 and 2000, and it looks like that trend is going to continue and intensify. Keep downsizing, boys! You'll bring this big economy down yet. Keep polluting the ocean. Sooner or later you'll kill it. The alternative? Cut hours, not jobs. Spread the vanishing work. Keep your own markets' markets employed and minimally traumatized.]
   Those two cities remain the primary addresses for senior executives, but a spokesman at corporate HQ in Charlotte, Robert L. Stickler [perfect name for an execution announcer - ed.], declined yesterday to say where the cuts would be made. "They will really come across the franchise," Mr. Stickler said. The banking company now employs 150,000 people.
   Bank of America's chairman and chief executive, Hugh L. McColl Jr., in a statement announcing the plan, said: "Our days of growth by merger and acquisition are behind us. For the most part, our merger transition work also is behind us."
   [Dream on, fat brain. You're laying off your own best markets and marketers. You and most of the rest of your ilk still see no connection between the nation's workforce and its customer base, let alone your own workforce and your own customer base. You're "playing' the float" between when you can "save money" by laying off your people, and when that ricochets around through your customers and puts another tiny little nick in your own revenues. Death by a thousand tiny little nicks. Trust us - your days of "growth" by merger and acquisition have just begun.]
   The challenge now, Mr. McColl said, is to make the bank's management structure, the product of multiple mergers over the years, more efficient.
   [No it isn't, you moron. The challenge is to play your part in providing the overall national payroll that is going to at least come back and maintain your own markets rather than concentrating and shrinking them. The challenge is to design and implement your own corporate brand of Timesizing, not downsizing.]

2. L'Unità, leftist Italian paper, halts publication, by Alessandra Stanley, NYT, A6.
   ROME...- L'Unità, once the most powerful leftist newspaper in Italy, published what was probably its last issue [yester]day, a victim of the fall of the Berlin Wall and market forces.... The newspaper, which went into receivership two weeks ago but was unable to reach agreements with potential buyers, formally "suspended" publication. It expressed the hope that in the fall some solution can emerge to rescue the newspaper, which has a debt of $33m, 123 journalists and a support staff of 70, and a hemorrhaging circulation of about 50,000....
   [So let's see, that's 123+70= 193 lost jobs.]
   The front page [yesterday] carried...a poignant editorial by the editor in chief. "We are dying of debts," wrote the editor, Giuseppe Caldarola. "We are dying of an insane financial crisis. But can so vital a part of the history of the left die this way?"...
   The Democratic Party of the Left, which split from the hardcore Communist Party in 1991 and is now Italy's largest center-left party, said it would try to find a way to salvage the newspaper. Other politicians and intellectuals mourned the likely passing of an Italian institution. Founded in 1924 by Antonio Gramsci as the mouthpiece of the Italian Communist Party, L'Unità was at the forefront of anti-Fascism before World War II and was forced to publish underground irregularly for the last years of the war....
   The newspaper reached its zenith during the radical chic of 1970's, when it was the most closely heeded voice of opposition to the governing center-right Christian Democratic Party, selling as many as a million copies on May 1, the international labor day. It was also the training ground for generations of Italian politicians....
   In 1997, L'Unità entered the private sector when the party sold most of its shares to private investors.
   [Hmm, a leftist newspaper betrays its own principles and privatizes, and then goes from privatization to bankruptcy in three years. Talk about nemesis.]
   As bankruptcy loomed earlier this year, the newspaper returned to direct party management, and...the party was spending $1m a month on it....

3. Church & Dwight is closing Syracuse plant, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
   ...affecting about 140 people, as it combines its laundry-detergent business with USA Detergents Inc. The plant, which makes liquid laundry detergent and cat litter, will shut early next year. Its work force represents about 13% of Church & Dwight's employees..\.. The maker of Arm and Hammer products...Brillo and Super Scoop..\..based in Princeton, NJ, will take charges of about $20m for severance and other costs, mostly in the third quarter, and will have about $3m in start-up costs over the next year....
   [Start-up where of what? Bad reporting!]

4. Roxy.com to move most of its workers to Fla. - Marlborough [Mass.]-based online retailer to cut about 48 of 178 jobs in consolidation, by Stephanie Stoughton, Boston Globe, C1.
   ...A[n] on-line seller of consumer electronics will move most of its work force to a new operations center in Florida as part of a major reorganization.... Executives also expect Roxy.com's staff of 178 to shrink by up to 27% over the next two months. The firm will cut up to 48 jobs, most supervisory positions that overlapped after its acquisition last year of Everything Wireless, a catalog and online retailer in Hollywood, Fla.... Last month, Roxy.com laid off 20 employees....
   [Really. News to us. Count 'em now. Let's see, 48+20= 68 jobcuts total out of 178+20= 198 workforce total, giving us an overall percentage of 68/198= 34% overall cut.]
   Roxy.com will be moving its Hollywood, Fla. employees and most of its Marlborough staff to the new 68,000-square-foot warehouse in Miramar, Fla. About 30 employees will remain at the company's Massachusetts' HQ, which now has 114 workers..\..
   In recent months, online retailers [in general] have been slashing costs and laying off employees.... About 122 Internet companies have cut more than 7,000 jobs since December, according to a survey by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago job-placement firm. And one in five of those companies has failed, the report said....
   [Wait a minute. Isn't this the same Internet in which the captains of our banking industry in our first item above have so much blind faith? Will someone please tell those bozos (Hugh L. McColl Jr. and your spokesman, Robert L. Stickler, this means you) that the Internet is clearly not panacea they seek?!]

1. Conseco, needing to pay debt, plans job cuts at finance arm, b Floyd Norris, NYT, C1.
   ...The troubled insurance and finance company said yesterday that it planned to eliminate 2,000 jobs from its Conseco Finance operation and sell numerous assets as it sought to raise cash to meet debt payments coming due.... At the finance unit...the company plans to sell 5 business units and to reduce costs by closing some offices. ...That would lead to [the] loss of [the] 2,000 jobs....

2. First Data will close centers; 1,940 to lose jobs, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, C2.
   ...[An Atlanta-based firm] which provides billing services and operates call centers said it is cutting...about 6.7% of its work force as it closes...24-hour call centers in Tucson [Ariz.] and Pensacola, Fla., by the end of the year.... The Tucson center employs about 1,100 and the Pensacola...800.... About 40 positions at the teleservices unit's headquarters in Omaha are also being cut....
   [That only leaves the question of why, and the sloppy-headline NYT version today, "First Data is cutting 2,000 teleservices jobs," AP via NYT, C4, gives the answer -]
   ...The Tucson and Pensacola centers have been providing long-distance operator and customer support for WorldCom, which is not renewing its contract with First Data's teleservices subsidiary. First Data...employs 31,000 people worldwide.

3. Delco Remy will eliminate 860 jobs as it reorganizes, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...An auto-parts maker plans to eliminate...12% of its work force and take a [Q4] $22m charge...to reorganize in the United States, Britain and Canada. The charge...will mainly cover the cost of worker buyouts, early retirements, severance and other payments. About 800 of the jobs will be eliminated in the U.S. and Canada. The reorganization will save $20m a year....

4. Guilford Mills is moving some operations to Mexico, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...A fabric maker will move some operations from 2 plants in Greensboro, NC, to Tampico, Mexico, dismissing...400 people...at its Fishman plant [and an undetermined number] at its Greenberg plant..\.. The job cuts at its Fishman plant are about 8.3% of its total U.S. work force [and will leave it with] 4,400 employees in the United States. It currently has 650 employees in Mexico..\.. It will stop dyeing and finishing fabric at [Fishman] once current production is complete [while] work will be reduced at its Greenberg plant in the first quarter of 2001....

1. Kmart to cut inventory, jobs and 72 stores, by Leslie Kaufman, NYT, C1.
   [This story, covered yesterday, got more complete and accurate overnight so we moved it to today.]
   ...The retailer..\..based in Troy, Mich...also said that of the 72 stores it was closing [of its 2400 total], 6 were the Super K format...said previously [to be] the key to future growth.... As stores close, the company said, about 5,000 jobs, accounting for almost 2% of its 278,000 employees, will be eliminated. Some of the workers affected may find jobs at other Kmart stores, the company said.... The new chief executive..\..Charles C. Conaway [who started 7 weeks ago] said his basic focus was to force Kmart to demand a "higher return on all its assets," from real estate to inventory. As a result, he said the company was closing stores that were profitable, but not profitable enough....
   [Apparently this guy has never heard that wise saying, "Don't squeeze the butterfly." Or "gimme, gimme" never gets - especially when you have to bash your best markets and marketers, your own employees, to grasp for it. Where did we get this pervasive graceless greed? From the speculators on Wall Street? Or just from missing the point of technology and using it, not to enhance people but to replace them? And the whole bad habit of adjusting the people to the technology, not the technology to the people?]
   In addition to replacing its outmoded computer systems, the company expects to invest $210m to improve its distribution and logistics network. In interviews yesterday, Mr. Conaway gave some hint of how he hoped this technology would make Kmart's sales perk up. "He is aghast when he deals with technology that is 10 years old when his competitors have technology that is 2 years old," said Kurt Barnard, president of Barnard Retail Trend Report. "He wants to create a system where every buyer is completely informed every moment on how the purchases are doing and then really hold their feet to the fire."
   [Sounds like a very high-intensity, unpleasant place to shop. Sounds like he doesn't mind, not only pressuring his employees, but his customers too. These high-stress, self-important CEOs think they can remake the world in their own vein-bursting apoplectic image. But just because they've lost the secret to life, why should we turn ourselves into masochists to humor their sad sadism? Watch now the gradual exodus of customers from FleetBoston. Watch now the gradual exodus of customers from Kmart. Watch now the gradual exodus of voters from the two major parties.]
   Mr. Conaway added that the systems would also dictate all sorts of decisions made by managers, like when to mark down merchandise.
   [Ah, not only an admirer of the Marquis de Sade, but a control freak as well. Heil, Konavay!]
   For example, he said, after two weeks of unusually cool weather hurt sales last spring, store buyers chose to wait to mark down a lot of apparel items, and they eventually had to take bigger cuts to match competitors. A new computer system, he said, would have demanded that the markdowns be made earlier and therefore would have reduced the total markdown that was needed to move the product.
   [For that, he'd need a computer system that monitors the weather. Sounds like he's quite swept away with the current panacea, New Technology. Even the speculators on Wall Street are noticing it in his case -]
   ...Analysts remain skeptical that technology will solve the retailer's biggest problems. "Look, you can buy technology," said George Strachan, with Goldman Sachs, "but you also have to infuse the culture with how to use technology, how to read the data...."
   [Will wonders never cease? - a Wall St. analyst saying that technology isn't everything?! - you might need some training to go along with it? "Be still, my heart!"]

2. Circuit City Stores to eliminate 1,000 jobs, Bloomberg via NYT, C3.
   ...The 2nd-largest U.S. consumer electronics chain said yesterday that it would close eight distribution centers and cut...1.7% of its work force, as it remodeled most superstores and stopped selling appliances.... In June, the company warned that gross-profit margins would be narrower than expected, hurt by a drop in demand for major appliances. Shares...fell....

3. Kodak Polychrome [Graphics] will close Massachusetts plant, AP via NYT, C3.
   ...The company, a joint venture of the Eastman Kodak Co. and Sun Chemical of Japan..\..is closing its plant in Holyoke, Mass., putting 260 people out of work. The plant makes coated plates used by newspapers and commercial printers. The company...said the closing was part of a worldwide revamping effort that includes eliminating 10 to 15% of its 4,200 jobs.
   [Let's split the diff and call it 12.5%. That would give us, let's see, 12.5% of 4200 = 525 layoffs "worldwide." We can finetune this as later announcements come along.]

1. Alcoa to cut 400 jobs at a factory in Canada, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...The world's largest maker of aluminum said it would cut...about 18% of the...work force..\..at a former Reynolds Metals plant...in Baie-Comeau, Quebec, which employs 2,200..\.. The company offered early retirement to 334 workers.... Alcoa also plans to reduce regular and overtime work that will be the equivalent of 70 full-time positions.
   [If they'd previously spread this out onto 70 people, maybe they'd not have to cut so much now - your employees are your own best markets and marketers.]
   After buying Reynolds in May for $5.8B in stock and debt, Alcoa said it expected to cut annual costs by $150m within a year.
   [Again, the lethal takeover-downsizing connection made obvious.]

2. Ralcorp to close a plant, Bloomberg via NYT, C25.
   ...The maker of store-brand crackers and cereal said today that it would close a Baltimore mayonnaise factory by January and dismiss its 195 employees to reduce costs. Ralcorp said production of salad dressings will be shifted from its Martin Gillet & Co. unit, which has been operating in Baltimore since 1811, to a plant in Dunkirk, NY, that it acquired this month with its $132.4m purchase of the Red Wind Co....
   [Again, the lethal takeover-downsizing connection, and - how stupid and unimaginative do you have to be to throw away a tourist attraction like an operating 1811 tradition in America, the land where people are fascinated by old stuff because they have so little of it? And, just to rattle the workforce a bit, keep them pay demands down -]
   Ralcorp expects to add an unspecified number of jobs at Dunkirk and at a Kansas City, Kan. plant.
   [Probably at lower pay. Shades of yesterday's article (7/24/00) on our "power elite's" latest fad to stifle wage increases = frenzied corporate relocation.]

3. [unreported in May -]
   Ford to sell Belarus plant, Bloomberg via NYT, C4.
   ...Ford stopped assembling Escort cars and Transit minivans at the plant near Minsk two months ago because of low demand.

4. Stormy job forecast - Machines replace weather observers at rural airports, Ellen Barry & A.J. Higgins, Boston Globe, B1.
   AUGUSTA, Maine- ...As [Agnes] Sharpe returned to a sheltered 10-by-12 room to note down the cloud layers she had seen, the machine..\..that will replace her...sent a stream of data to a device that reads it to pilots in a simulated human voice. And next month, Sharpe will leave her swivel chair at the Augusta Weather Station for the last time. The machine will remain. "It's going to happen," [the four-year employee] said. "Resisting is sort of like trying to stop a train."
   [Here it is, the dawn of a new millennium. And we're ever more trapped into rationalizing bad news by assuming it's inevitable, instead of designing a win-win alternative like Timesizing. We at Timesizing.com claim this attitude is luddite = technology-hating. It's not active in the sense of destroying technology, but it's passive in the sense of using technology to replace people and blocking technology's true purpose of facilitating people and making their lives easier.]
   When the Augusta Weather Station shuts down Aug. 16, only one of Maine's 17 rural airports will still rely on staff members to give pilots the weather. But, if the Federal Aviation Administration has its way, observers at Houlton International Airport will get pink slips a month later, ending five years of pitched opposition from workers who argue that the automated system will never match the judgment and expertise of trained people. Houlton administrators issue warnings that the switchover to the Automated Surface Observing System may end in accidents and deaths.
   [The same thing happened over the last century as New England and national lighthouses were completed automated and left unmanned. And aren't we all thrilled with the robotic voices of today's automated Directory Assistance on the telephone?! Maybe it's time to automate Congress by a modern electronic democracy system - think of the salaries and perks that we taxpayers would save, think of the imperviousness to PACs and lobbyists and special interests that we would gain. Think of ending the bloviating and filibustering and pork-barrelling and stone-walling of this pack of narrowly interested nincompoops. Never mind the paltry savings from a few mediocre-pay jobs FAA - automating Congress would save REAL money.]
   But 20 years after the FAA dsecided to install the automated system at 900 small regional airports, including 56 in New England, dissenting voices have grown fainter and fainter.
   [Go after the little guys first. They have less power.]
   Government officials who back the transition to the cheaper automated system say weather observers are simply trying to protect their jobs as technology overtakes them.
   [How utterly selfish of them! Imagine trying to protect their own miserable livelihoods. The rest of us humans want to progress with the great adventure of technology, and all these weather observers can think of is their paltry jobs. We should be replacing ALL of us, even the jobs we are running to! As Sismondi foresaw in 1819, "In truth then, there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England." (New Principles of Political Economy, Richard Hyse trans. (1991), p. 563, fn). Then we can have the win-lose capitalists' presumed dream - we can all starve together, because they have not designed a solution for the Ford-Reuther paradox - Ford, "Let's see you unionize these robots." Reuther, "Let's see you sell them cars." Only Timesizing has a gradual market-oriented core solution for this dilemma.]
   "A typewriter salesman can come in and explain why you should use a typewriter instead of a computer, you know, what it the power goes out," said Bob Chartuk, a spokesman for the National Weather Service, which developed the automated system with the FAA and the Dept. of Defense. "There is a bit of - what's the word - wistful thinking at the ending of eras," he said.
   ["Ending of eras" can be reversed. We're prisoners only of our own myths and mouthings.]
   Terry Larson...last Wednesday night...shined a spotlight up to the bottom of the cloud ceiling [and] estimated that [it] was at 600 feet.... At the same moment, the automated system was informing pilots that the cloud ceiling was at 9,000 feet.... To Larson...the automated system...at regional airports amounts to lowering safety standards for people in rural areas. "You have to realize that the FAA will never remove the human observers at your major airports, so that begs the question, why will you remove the observers at your rural airports? Isn't my life just as important when I fly into Houlton, Maine, or Augusta?... Why do you have a double standard?"
   ...Senator Olympia Snowe...in 1997 halted the switchover for three years while the FAA tested the automated system's effectiveness.
   [Damn - they wanted to test it on those living guinea pigs in Maine!]
   With that moratorium over, [Snowe] is watching the transition with "concern," a spokesman said.
   During the three-year moratorium, the FAA carried out a 120-day independent review of the system and concluded that it "performed just as reliably as human observers around the country," said James Washington, director of air traffic system requirements for the FAA. [Then why aren't they installing them at major airports. Oops, maybe they are (Amtrak, here we come!) -]
   Impressed with reports from the airports that already use the system, various members of Congress "are urging" the FAA to continue installing the systems, [James] Washington said. Based on the 26 sites where people have been replaced by the automated system, each installation will bring an annual savings of about $200,000, he said.
   There is good reason that the issue of accuracy hasn't been put to rest, despite at least five years of debate: It's difficult to directly compare the way [a human] reports the weather to the way the automated system does. [A human, like Sharpe,] has the ability to report ceiling visibility in a 360° panorama, rather than in a small section of air, as the system does. She can rephrase and interpret her observations, and she can draw conclusions based on memory. She can measure the depth of snow and detect cloud-to-cloud lightning, which the automated system's technology has not achieved.
   [So the problem here is that the designers are really running two experiments, not just the single experiment of automating humans' activity. The second one is, they've changed the activity before automating it, thus disregarding the age-old wisdom of K.I.S.S. = "keep it simple, stupid." With lives at stake, these clowns are introducing two huge areas of uncertainty. Dumb dumb dumb. We suspect this happens a lot in automation, and yet the designers hide behind the prevailing sacrosanctity of technology, where any questioning can be silenced by charges of heresy dba "Luddism!"]
   Conversely, Sharpe takes measurements less frequently, and sometimes less exactly, than the system. Pilots hoping to speak to an observer sometimes have a hard time reaching one on the phone, said Jim Carlyle, a Winthrop man who has been flying in Maine for nearly 40 years. And along with people comes the possibility of human error, said Drew Steketee, a spokesman for the Aircraft Owners and Piliots Assoc....
   [But then, along with automation comes the possibility of technical difficulties and breakdowns. This very day a Concorde crashed on takeoff from Paris, killing all 113 on board and several in the little suburban hotels it crashed into. This was a technology that had an almost perfect accident-free record for the last 20 years - none with fatalities - and now France has grounded the whole fleet. More business for trains on both sides of the Atlantic. The smart move is to enhance human performance with this technology, not replace it. Why can't we have both? Here's a place where we could have our cake and eat it too. If we really have a budget surplus, how about using it to make our lives safer instead of launching out on ludicrous all-at-once experiments that we can't possibly pretest properly. (And then there's the underfunded Coast Guard, Parks Service, Immigration Service....)]
   ...Bob McGee, director of the Augusta airport [said], "...When I was [working in northern Maine], we had an issue with lighthouses being automated. Now there weren't any jobs for lighthouse keepers, and believe me, it took years to resolve that"....
   [Is it resolved or have we, trapped in our "technology is always and only WONDERFUL" religion, just quelled research on the safety and reliability, and automation-linked accidents, of unmanned lighthouses and now - weather stations? Hey, let's automate Congress. Let's automate CEOs! What are we waiting for?! Only a timesizer can ask that question, because only Timesizing, Not Downsizing smoothly and automatically spreads and optimizes the remaining human employment every step of the way, without government or private-sector makework to neutralize the technological work savings - or government and private-sector charity.]

1. Rock-Tenn to shut down carton factory in Wisconsin, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
   ...A maker of boxes for consumer products said yesterday that it would close its folding-carton plant in Madison, Wis. and dismiss as many as 200 employees, or 2.4% of its work force, because business in the Midwest has slowed.
   [Undoubtedly because so many other shortsighted CEOs have cut jobs instead of hours.]
   Rock-Tenn will cut 80-100 jobs the next 30-60 days and 100 more the next six months.... The company has about 8,500 employees and operates 20 U.S. plants....

2. Abitibi-Consolidated plans cuts at newsprint plants, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
   ...The world's largest newsprint maker said yesterday that it would close a U.S. mill and reduce output at a Canadian plant by about a third in a bid to improve profit. An unprofitable 130,000 ton-a-year newsprint plant in West Tacoma, Wash., is scheduled for closing at the end of the year. Montreal-based Abitibi said. The mill employs 180 people. Abitibi also is set to shut down a 50,000 ton-a-year paper machine at its Wayagamack plant in Trois-Rivieres, between Montreal and Quebec City. Abitibi is in talks...to sell the factory, which employs 540.

1. Salton says it will lay off 470 people at Missouri plant, Reuters via NYT, C3.
   ...A maker of household appliances said yesterday that it would lay off 470 employees and a toaster and toaster oven plant...to cut costs. Production at the plant in Macon, Mo., will be shifted to lower-cost overseas vendors.... The layoffs will occur between October and December. The plant...will be converted into a distribution center. About 70 employees will be retained....
   [Let's see. Total employees = 470+70 = 540, so this is a layoff of 87% of the company to diminish our national consumer base and worsen our trade deficit. Not a sustainable strategy, but sooo many "smart" US executives are pursuing it - and their own incremental destruction.]

1. Consolidated Papers to cut 10% of workforce, Dow Jones via NYT, C3.
   ...A producer of printing paper said yesterday that it planned to reduce its work force by...about 700 employees, in a move to cut costs..\.. Consolidated Papers Inc...based in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., said the layoffs had already begun. The cuts, which will affect hourly and salaried workers, are part of a two-year $100m cost-reduction plan initiated in 1999 to make the company more competitive....

2. Alliance & Leicester plans cuts, Bloomberg via NYT, C3.
   The No. 6 British mortgage lender...said it plans to cut costs and to concentrate on customer groups, rather than products, as it tries to reverse a 38% stock decline this year..\.. Alliance & Leicester PLC...said it would outsource some transaction processing and give managers incentives to reduce costs....
   [So, unspecified job hemorrhaging.]

1. Merrill Lynch to cut about 1,800 jobs in brokerage business - Expenses are rising 25%, while revenue is going up 15%, by Patrick McGeehan, NYT, C2.
   Grappling with slowing growth in the brokerage business...E. Stanley O'Neal, who runs..\..Merrill's brokerage operations, yesterday afternoon...told the employees that 900 full-time jobs in the brokerage unit would be eliminated beginning this week. Another 400 people who work for the firm as consultants and independent contractors will also lose their jobs and about 500 jobs will be eliminated through attrition. The job cuts amount to about 5% of the unit's 37,000 employees. He said the cuts would affect all segments of the brokerage operation, which is based in Plainsboro, NJ, but would have little effect in the branch offices..\..
   An internal announcement of the cuts...came after Merrill announced that its second-quarter earnings rose 34%, despite a slim increase in revenue from commissions and slower growth in the amount of money customers invested at the firm.... Like Schwab, Merrill recorded its second-biggest quarterly profit, after an extraordinary first quarter. But Merrill's earnings gain was driven by increases in stock trading and underwriting and fees from advising on mergers and acquisitions.... None of Merrill's 15,200 brokers will be laid off.... While Merrill's employees were dealing with the firm's second round of layoffs in less than two years, workers at Schwab were cheering their firm's proven ability to attract assets even when the stock market is in turmoil....
   [So moron Merrill expects to "win" with demoralized employees, while Schwab and its employees are surfin'.  You can look up this nutty idea of laying off employees when you're close to record profits in your course catalog under "Advanced Depression Inducement 409."]

2. CNH Global to close plants and eliminate 1,800 jobs, by Marcin Skomial, NYT, C4.
   ...The world's second-largest maker of farm tractors and combines said yesterday that it would close or sell seven plants in the U.S. and Germany, eliminating...about 4.7% of its work force. The decision by the company, which was created last year through the acquisition of the Case Corporation by New Holland NV, is part of plans announced in February to reduce its worldwide workforce eventually by about 7,200 jobs to cut costs by $500m a year.
   [Well, 7200 is 200 more than the 7000 that were mentioned in the 2/03/00 article, so we'll only count those 200 additional jobcuts here.]

3. Aetna says rising costs will lead it to miss earnings forecasts - Analysts say improving relations with doctors and patients has a cost, by Milt Freudenheim, NYT, (C1 ->) C12.
   [Yes, what a bother. Why don't we just leave relations unimproved.]
   ...Aetna said recently that it would close unprofitable Medicare HMO's with 355,000 members in 11 states next year....

1. Sony Music lays off 500 [after Universal-Polygram cut 3,000], Reuters/Variety via AOLNews via RadioTony, 03:29 EST.
   ...The recent Universal-Polygram merger was driven by the desire to consolidate Seagram-owned Universal's domestic music operations with Polygram's powerful international presence, and that merger resulted in the elimination of about 3,000 jobs worldwide. Once it clears the requisite regulatory hurdles, the similarly inspired Warner-EMI Music merger should result in an almost equal number of personnel cutbacks....

2. Sony Music lays off 500, Reuters/Variety via AOLNews via RadioTony, 03:29 EST.
   HOLLYWOOD - Sony Music Entertainment said Friday that "on a worldwide basis, approximately 500 employees may be leaving the company'' in what may be the first rumbles of the seismic changes that digital delivery and distribution systems could wreak upon the music business. Representing about 3.7% of the company's nearly 13,500 employees, these personnel cuts will cross all labels and divisions....
   Sony's move is a further example of the contracting record business, but the first that acknowledges significant changes in the industry as a result of e-commerce and the Internet, of which the current battles with MP3.com and Napster represent just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.... As of last week, Sony's year-to-date share of the U.S. current album market was 15.5%, trailing Universal's 28.1% and BMG's 20.8%, but topping Warners' 13.4% and EMI's 7.4%.

• Ebony ends publication in South Africa - Slower-than-expected growth of black middle class crimped ad sales, by Henri Cauvin, NYT, C10.
  DURBAN...- The South African edition of Ebony magazine...Ebony South Africa..\..introduced nearly five years ago in the afterglow of the country's triumph over apartheid, has shut down after failing to find profits or many readers.... Prosperity has beeen slower than expected in reaching the black majority.... That meant a retail market with still too little interest in advertising to black consumers and a magazine industry with little room for a publication celebrating a level of success that few black people here can yet conceive, let alone achieve....
  [People think prosperity happens by itself or by magic. It doesn't. It has to be designed to happen. Sharing the high-demand skills and employment is the superhighway to prosperity. This is definitely the challenge for the world of the 21st century. All the robots and computer hardware and software we can dream up will not accomplish real socioeconomic progress at this point. Now it's social software that we need, meaning a new technology of sharing. Timesizing is the first and still the only complete core design for the necessary new economic institutions. Too bad Ebony could not adjust to the lower level of success that most South African blacks can now conceive and achieve. Too bad Ebony didn't take a leadership role in leading them upward - with overtime reinvestment in training and hiring, and timesizing.]

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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