Phil "Mr. Timesizing®" Hyde

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Downsizings in November/98
[Commentary] © 1998 Philip Hyde, PO Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA

11/29/98 Despite low unemployment, companies look to downsizing to increase profits, by Davan Maharaj, Boston Sunday Globe, p. E7.
[This article's title is rebutted by its last line -] You can't shrink your way into profitability [Wayne Cascio, U.Col.]
[En route, it repeats some points worth remembering -]
Applied Materials in California's Silicon Valley...fired 2,000 employees - 15% of its workforce - in August,
only three months after firing 1,500.
[Recall that high tech is our second hottest growth industry, after prison construction (ref...David Nyhan, "The prison population is rising...", in Boston Globe, 8/5/98, p.A23).]
US companies announced in October plans to cut 91,500 jobs, the most in nearly three years.
In the first ten months of this year, job cuts totaled 523,000, nearly all of them domestic.
That's 200,000 more than the number of jobs eliminated in the same period last year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago outplacement firm that tracks job cuts. The Challenger numbers show that downsizing continues unabated even though the unemployment rate has remained less than 5% for 16 consecutive months.
If the economy [really is] robust, why are hundreds of thousands of workers still losing their jobs?
...Downsizing has become a strategy that is used in good times [as well as] bad [and on good employees as well as bad].... Applied's periodic layoffs are consistent with an industry that practices just-in-time employment, according to Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford University management professor who has studied...semiconductor companies.... "Some companies...will hold inventories of goods for a long time, but they don't want to hold inventories of people."
[Well, then, they're going to be holding inventories of goods for longer and longer, because your customers are "inventories of people" - employed people.] As Reuther said to Ford after Ford said, "Let's see you unionize these robots" - "Let's see you sell them cars."
The latest firings [says Peter Capelli of the Wharton School] confirm what "workers already know: that there is little long-term job security, and your ability to retain your current job is beyond your control" [and has nothing to do with your "merit" or productivity, but everything to do with increasing short-term profits for Wall Street.]
[It's clear that, for short term highs, Wall Street is committing long term suicide and taking the rest of the country down first. But the pace of change is accelerating and the longer term is getting shorter every day.]
A poll released in September by Shell Oil Co. found that more than half of all working Americans
- have been downsized,
- have worked for a company that has merged or been bought out, or
- have moved to a different city because of their job....
3.6 million workers were laid off during the two years ended December 1997, from jobs they had held for at least three years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.... Patrick Cleary of the National Assn. of Manufacturers said that while layoffs are painful, workers who lose their jobs are being quickly rehired by other employers.
["Quickly" to Cleary is not "immediately" or even "quickly enough" for many employees, such as the 17% unemployed over age 50 in high tech.]
"This is a big country."
[So is the ocean, and the ozone layer, and the ground water and so was the number of American bison, passenger pigeons and giant moas. "Big" is not "limitless." Some of these guys on Wall Street won't "get it" until they've experienced those limits first hand whatever the pain for whatever many people.]
"You can have downsizings and (hirings) going on at the same time," said Cleary...
[If you had hirings going on in equal or greater numbers for equal or greater pay then you wouldn't have stagnant markets, would you, and nobody would be complaining.]
Companies in the S&P 500 that merely eliminated jobs from 1980 to 1994 suffered long term losses to profits and stock prices, according to Wayne F. Cascio, a University of Colorado professor. The same research revealed that the most profitable companies were the ones that produced new revenue by increasing staff and other assets, developing new products and entering new markets. "The bottom line is, you have to grow your business...."
[And you can't grow by shrinking.]

[Those of you who remember the Club of Rome and its Limits to Growth study at MIT in the '70s in which growth was the enemy must be gawking now at the spectacle of Wall Street pushing for and likely soon to find its own (and our) limits to growth. Strangely these are limits we never anticipated in the 70s. As Wall Street makes things harder and harder for its broad consumer base, and easier and easier for its wealthiest investors, we approach a condition where there's too little consumer base to sustain too much would-be investment ("savings" in Keynes' lingo). It's a radical and extreme concentration of wealth daring anyone or anything to limit it, scorning the rumored limits within itself, defying the notion that "the more concentration, the less circulation." Boy, why do we occasionally-intelligent humans always have to learn the hard way, and, it seems, repeatedly? Isn't this, on a larger scale, exactly what we went through in 1929?]

11/29 Lessons from survivors of downsizing, edited by Juliet Brudney, Bos Globe, E4.
Q: What did we learn from job-search efforts that can help others? by J. and R.P., Chelmsford, Mass.
- The age issue is real; you have to deal with it. Fighting it is unproductive....
- Start your own business. You might starve, but there's always hope....
- Rejection will happen far more than you can imagine. You must learn to handle it....
- Give yourself the occasional day off from the search.... Engage in self-pity, even cry....
A: Timely and useful suggestions. US companies unloaded 91,531 workers in October, the highest number of monthlyl cuts in nearly three years, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an international outplacement firm.
[Boy, when people are offering this kind of stuff as helpful and it's called "timely and useful" by the worklife editor of the Boston Globe, pass the Guyana cocktails - we are really, I mean REALLY, pathetic and powerless in this primitive excuse for an economic system. "From cutting edge to cutting block." The alternative? - Timesizing, Not Downsizing.]

11/29 For Toys "R" Us, it's a whole new game; Retailer tries to adjust to threat from discounters - Recognizing its troubles,
Toys "R" Us recently said it would close 59 stores and cut up to 3,000 jobs.
It also slashed its inventory, a move that hurt many manufacturers, by Rachel Beck, Bos Globe, E7.
[You've heard of the "multiplier" effect when an economy is recovering? Here we have a good exemple of the "dividifier" effect when an economy is in a death spiral. A story five pages earlier ("Goldilocks returns" - "consumer spending rose 0.5% last month following a 0.7% rise in September...consumer confidence is rebounding") tried to spin consumer confidence and spending upward but here is dramatic evidence that "It ain't necessarily so," and Toys R Us is taking a lot of toymakers down along with it = the "domino effect" in economics = the never before mentioned "dividifier" effect, the reverse of Keynes' multiplier.]

The takeover-downsizing link again - ]
11/28 Viag to buy Algroup in $8.7b deal, forming '70s-style diversified firm
, Bloomberg News, via Bos Globe, C2.
ZURICH ...Germany's No. 3 utility agreed to buy Algroup in a stock swap...marking the biggest takeover of a Swiss firm by a foreign rival and creating a company with interests in gas, electricity, aluminum, chemicals, packaging and communications.... The new company...ranks in Europe's top five in most of its businesses.... Algroup and Viag expect to save 570 million marks a year because of cost cuts, and plan to shed about 2,500 jobs or 2% of their combined work force of 127,000....
[And if they timesized instead of downsized, they'd have an employee-cheering workweek of 39.2 hrs/wk and avoid chopping 2,500 of their own best customers and spinning the death spiral.]

11/24 A modest proposal for the 1990s, by Steven Levingston - Dollars and Nonsense, Bos Globe, C4.
Wall Street firms...have dished up the promise...[of] a never-ending feast of stock market riches. Well, guess what? Now average investors like me are beginning to wonder whether they will be able to put food on the table in the wake of the world's economic and stock market bedlam.... So it is with rare...satisfaction that I see in recent weeks that
- Merrill Lynch has cut 3,400 jobs.
- ING Barings has shaved 1,200 workers.
- J.P. Morgan is lopping off 5% of its work force, or about 740 people.
- BT Alex. Brown is reported to be considering chopping 10% of it 18,000 staffers.
- Other cuts are expected to follow this first wave.
[Steve goes on to propose slaughtering the layoffees as food for starving investors, though only 15% of their carcasses would be edible, "the rest being composed of little more than hot air." This Business Opinion piece reflects investor anger at Wall Street which is justified because many of these analysts have pushed CEOs into short-term stock boosts by downsizing - as if this is a universally extendable and sustainable strategy rather than nothing but short-sighted advice to use toxic cosmetics. Maybe some of these analysts will wake up to the real nature of downsizing, as Steve Roach of Morgan Stanley, the guru of downsizing did a few years ago when someone close to him (his sister?) got downsized.
[However, with 3400+1200+740+1800 people thrown out of their jobs, that's still another 7,140 people shocked out of normal spending patterns and worsening our officially non-existent labor glut and depression. Wall Street should have downsized its workweek instead of its workforce, as should other CEOs.
[Also, the jocular proposal to slaughter and eat the downsizees is disturbingly close to real and justified fears of what this kind of global labor glut actually provokes. Viviane Forrester in her recent best-selling French book The Economic Horror (L'horreur économique) traces a frequently repeated pattern in this stage of the long business cycle - "exploitation, exclusion, elimination." Both World Wars show the extremes of the elimination part, not only for the hundreds of thousands who got permanently removed from the labor glut of the 1920s and 30s by "conveniently" becoming glorious war dead, but also the millions of civilians in Germany and the Ukraine and many other lands who were, to coin a phrase, "genocided." Germany didn't eat the "fruits" of its gas ovens, but it did turn them into lampshades and other articles.
[Now with too little "solution" from Korea and Viet Nam and our other small wars, our much-denied labor glut is getting us into some serious money with our #1 industry - prison construction. Prisons are even draining funds away from our usual people storage locker and makework campaign, education.
[And now that the Cold War is over, the federal Republicans are diversifying beyond their usual Pentagon makework campaign (though they're still pushing more money on the Pentagon than it wants) to a makework campaign that has become real big in America over the last twenty years, litigiousness - $13m spent on trying to convict Espy, $44m on fishing for something against Clinton. The American Dream has become suing the deep pocket (or hitting the lottery). With leadership like this, when are we going to admit that the work just isn't there so we should stop trying to invent it and just share what's left as it disappears into the factories of robots and cubicles of computers? - Timesizing, Not Downsizing.]

[And now, a classic example of merger and downsizing -]
11/24 Unum, Provident to merge in stock swap - $4.75 billion transaction would create nation's largest disability insurer, by Hampton and Ratigan, Bloomberg News via Bos Globe, C3.
PORTLAND, Maine...An undetermined number of workers will lose their jobs, and some of the combined 105 sales offices may be shut, [James] Orr said [Unum's chairman and chief executive].... Their union will be completed in mid-1999, in time to add to next year's earnings. Unum is technically being merged into Provident to simplify state regulatory procedures, a spokesman for the companies said....
["Next year's earinings", "state regulatory procedures".... These boys can come up with all the impressive "reasons" they want to, they're still cutting their own best markets by cutting their own employees - and their dependents, and all the small businesses where they spend money. They're committing slow suicide and they'll have to merge further in a year or two because even today's curtailed markets won't be there.]
The company plans to keep "significant corporate operations" in Chattanooga; Columbia, SC; Worcester, Mass., and in the Toronto-Burlington, Ontario region of Canada.
[Don't do us any favors, guys, carry on with your blind experimentation in nuking yourselves - or to be more precise, neutron-bombing yourselves - where you kill all the people and leave the plant and equipment - e.g., the robots that are doing all the work - never mind you've slashed the markets for it. Hey, I guess that's the biggest problem of the technological age - markets are human, and robots "don't buy cars."]

[At last! - some cuts at the top where they save the most payroll. If layoffs are necessary (and they aren't until the whole firm has shrunk to a 10-hr workweek and is about to go bankrupt), they should start at the top like this -]
11/20 HMO cuts jobs of 4 executives - Decision by Harvard comes amid unprecedented losses, by Alex Pham, Bos Globe, D1.
[See also story on 11/17 below "Harvard Pilgrim to end 100 jobs"]
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, the state's largest health maintenance organization [HMO] has eliminated the jobs of four high-level employees, including Dr. Patrick Mattingly, widely perceived as the number two executive at Harvard Pilgrim.... Others on the layoff list include Dr. John Ludden, senior vice president of medical affairs; Daniel D. Kaplan, senior vice president of the Massachusetts region; and William Schlag, vice president of marketing.... Efforts to contact Mattingly, Ludden, Kaplan, and Schlag yesterday were largely unsuccessful..\..
Harvard said cutbacks would be made "at all levels of the organization," but health care observers were surprised that the layoffs would claim executives at such lofty levels. Mattingly's departure, in particular, was unexpected. "It was a huge surpise to me," said Stephen Caulfield, chairman of the Chickering Group, a health insurance company in Cambridge, who said he is a friend of Mattingly. "I think he is a real thought leader in this industry, and I think he's been extraordinarily loyal and devoted to the plan."
[See what your loyalty got you, Patrick, John, Daniel, William? Hundreds of thousands of formerly loyal American employees have felt this feeling when treated like this. What goes around, comes around. How do you like the feeling, Patrick? Are you ready for an intelligent alternative now? - timesizing, not downsizing!
[Downsizing says "People can't change, so get rid of them." Timesizing says, "Humans are the most changible species there is. Of course people can change! The only truth in "You can't change human nature" is the unparalleled changibility of human nature. Downsizing is an insult to human versatility. Downsizing sells people short. Downsizing is defeatism.
[There have already been dozens of executives who have seen how brainless downsizing is - Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley, the original guru of downsizing, when a relative was laid off - Gerald Greene, former axeman at Chrysler, when he started at United Airlines - a management consultant writing in the Mother Jones Magazine.... This is how a bad strategy finally gets replaced by a better one - the tiny inner inner circle starts laying off their own. That's how civil rights came in - the Ku Klux Klan finally started hurting rich white kids who had joined the movement. That's how the witch craze of Salem finally stopped - the girls finally started accusing the power elite in the person of the Governor's wife. When that starts happening - when we finally break through the thick monetary insulation of the power elite, then and only then do they wake up and say "There MUST be another way". Then and only then do they side with the smarter, more human, more stable alternative that has been quietly waiting in the wings, polishing its presentation - in this case, Timesizing.]
In his job as senior vice president of planning and development, Mattingly was part of the inner circle of decision makers at Harvard Pilgrim. He played a key role in the company's strategic direction, health policy, and government relations. Mattingly was once in contention for the top job at Harvard Pilgrim after the 1995 merger of Harvard Community Health Plan [HCHP - affectionately known as "hiccup"] and Pilgrim Health Care....
Ludden, a psychiatrist, joined Harvard Community Health Care in 1972 [26 years of service for God's sake, and you LAY HIM OFF - this is on par with some of the custodians at Tufts!] as director of Harvard's Kenmore center. From 1983 to 1994, he was Harvard's top physician, serving as corporate medical director.
Kaplan has been in charge of negotiating contracts with Harvard's network of more than 15,000 physicians and 90 hospitals in Massachusetts....
Schlag oversaw the marketing and communications functions.
[Real smart - laying off your top marketer!]
"It wasn't the people, it was the positions," said Allan Greenberg, chief executive fo Harvard Pilgrim.
[Yeah yeah, "love the sinner, hate the sin."]
"We found we could spread the responsiblities of these positions or eliminate the work to some extent." Greenberg emphasized that Harvard Pilgrim's expected loss for 1998 of nearly $30 million, while unprecedented, is just 1% of the company's $3 billion budget. "We're talking about small variances here," he said.
[Then why make BIG reactions to small variances, Al? One percent drop and you lay off 100/4500 = over 2% of your employees, including four of your intimate colleagues, one of whom has been working there for over a quarter of a century? If you're "spreading the responsibilities of these positions anyway, you could have just cut the workweek 1% to 39.6 hours/week, prorated pay for everyone (including yourself), and KEPT EVERYONE TOGETHER. But oh no, such is your imagination and teamwork that you had to declare war on your own employees and dramatize a change at Pilgrim - now loyalty and years of service count for nothing. Look what happened to Japan's wonder economy once they started copying our downsizing stupidity instead of continuing their lifetime guarantee of employment.]
"As a nonprofit company, we've never tried to budget extraordinary profits. As a result, you have very small margins, and when you miss your numbers, you fall into the red zone."
[OK, then get your "nonprofit" butt onto a fluctuating workweek and cut the melodrama. We'd like to say "Well that's nonprofits for you - but nonprofits learned their stupidity from Chainsaw Dunlap and his fellow lemmings in the "profit" sector.]

11/18/98 Mass. firms' exports dip 1.1% in 2d quarter - Global crises...blamed, by Kimberly Blanton, Boston Globe, p.D5.
...Since February, Mass. manufacturers have reduced employment by 8,400 jobs. That is the biggest job loss in manufacturing in such a short period since 1993 [when the state lost 8,900 jobs between May and December]....

11/17 Stone & Webster offers early retirement to 600, Bloomberg News via Bos Globe, C7.
...but may need to eliminate more jobs next year.... It ended last year with about 6,100 employees.
[OOOOkay, 6100-600=5500. Stone & Webster, environmental engineers, could have avoided this expensive, humiliating and unecological move by simply reducing its corporate workweek from 40 to 5500/6100 x 40 = 36.1 hrs/wk, prorating pay for all and keeping everybody together. This is how Nucor and Lincoln Electric do it, plus hosts of companies who reinvent this strategy in every recession, such as the American Optical branch in St. Louis in 1975. It minimizes corporate stress (because everybody stays together), rather than maximizing it and making survivors paranoid, guilty, and overloaded. Human beings are the most social species of all (except maybe for bonobos) - split us apart and you sew trouble, keep us together and the trouble fades.]

11/17 Fidelity lays off 100 technology specialists, by Lynnley Browning, Bos Globe, C7.
...last week from its retail fund sales and institutional brokerage group. The reductions, involving 25 full-time staffers and 68 outside contractors, are the latest trimming in...unit which sells...directly to individual investors and operates the nation's second-largest discount brokerage.... The Boston-based firm hoped to offer full-timers other jobs within the company and had technology positions to fill.... Last week's cuts included two vice presidents and two directors.... [The] 1,200-member group...had already been trimmed by about 100 staffers in recent months. Around 60 junior to mid-level employees were let go early last month, barely one week after 30 employees in the group's retail marketing unit were told to find new jobs. Last week's cuts affected individuals, mostly software developers, in Fidelity offices across the East Coast and Texas.... The firm faces mounting competition from discount brokerage leader Charles Schwab Corp. and on-line trading outfits such as E-Trade.
[Yet again we see the brilliant strategy of laying off sales and marketing people. Yet again we see a company that successfully whined for state tax breaks a couple of years ago, supposedly to save jobs in Mass., losing jobs in Mass. This 1200-member unit could have done an across-the-board unit hours cut down to 31.7 hrs/wk, prorated pay, and kept everyone employed.]

11/17 Harvard Pilgrim to end 100 jobs, by Alex Pham, Bos Globe, C6.
...to deal with unexpectedly large financial losses this year. The HMO, which employs more than 4,500 people, said on Friday it had lost $22.2 million in the first three quarters of 1998 on revenue of nearly $2 billion.... The job reductions - the first significant downsizing for Harvard Pilgrim in recent memory - will be "at all levels of the organization."
[OK, let's see. 4500-100=4400. Harvard Pilgrim, alleged healer, could save these 100 jobs by doing an across-the-board hours cut from 40/wk to 4400/4500x40 = 39.1 hrs/wk. Lots of hospitals have done it, e.g., Brockton Hospital nurses in 1996, why not HMOs? Saves productivity, skill set, morale... "Physicians, heal thyselves."]

11/15 Sizing up downsizing - Book explores the stories behind the numbers as AT&T slices work force, bu Diane Lewis, Bos Globe, E4.
...Between 1984 and 1995, the company shed 120,000 jobs from its employment roster. Although AT&T had been laying off factory workers for years, the new cuts targeted white-collar workers for the first time.... "This was a company where people really did have a job for life. I was bowled over by the sense of family that people had at the firm. It was quite meaningful to them, and it seemed to be much more intense than at other places" [said Barbara Rudolph, author of "Disconnected," a new book published by The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster.] "AT&T is an extreme example of the forces at work in corporate America."
[Not forces - short-sightedness! While Japan offered lifetime employment to its workers, it outcompeted us. In the 1990s it started copying our auto-immune downsizing syndrome and look at it now. While AT&T offered lifetime employment to its workers, it was a model of courteous and efficient service. It started its big downsizings in 1984 and in just two years it was charging Phil Hyde for calls to Uganda every month that he didn't make - and nobody knew how to stop them until he insisted on getting a new phone number. Then how much longer did it take to get those infuriating robot operators on Directory Assistance?]
To dull the impact of job loss, AT&T and other US companies created a new workplace lexicon in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, one that has become an integral part of our vocabulary. "You're accepted for a package" means you're fired. "You're involuntarily separated" means you're fired. "Your job won't be there going forward" means you're fired. Other euphemisms such as downsizing, right-sizing, re-engineering, and reorganization joined the list...to lessen...a devastating experience for American workers...an incredible sense of loss../..The argument has been made that these changes are a reflection of very powerful economic forces....
[These changes are a reflection of nothing but a terrible mistake we made 65 years ago when we turned away from our 150-year history of easy work sharing and adopted the increasing strain of job creation - on the crazy idea that we could maintain an arbitrary workweek of 40 hours against all technological efficiencies of all future time.]

11/13 Lam Research sets 15% layoff [500 jobs], 2d-quarter charge, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, C2.
...resorts to its third round of cuts in nine months to stem losses...paring its work force to 2,800. That's down from 5,500 in January before two sets of job cuts left it with 3,300 employees.... In a round of cuts in February, Lam Research said it would close its facility in Wilmington, Mass., and lay off most of its 200 workers. The company also has facilities in Westborough, and in Maine and Vermont.... The orders aren't coming in fast enough for Lam to avoid the cuts needed to return it to profitability. Shares of Fremont, Calif-based Lam rose 2 1/16 to 16 15/16.
[A little cut of this, a little cut of that, and pretty soon - NO ORDERS AT ALL! Wake up, guys - a 15% hours cut for the whole company would bring your workweek down to a welcome 34 hours a week and maintain your morale, your productivity and your own markets (via your customers' customers, i.e., your own employees' consumer confidence). Cutting your own employees is cutting your own empire, your own power, your own control - whadja do, take an impotence pill?]

11/13 Maxwell Shoe's joint venture to shut 46 stores, Bloomoberg via Bos Globe, C7.
...from 99 to 53 [a mere half of its former self].

11/11/98 Cargill to buy grain unit from Continental Grain, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, C2.
The Continental businesses being acquired employ about 2,600 worldwide, including 1,550 in the United States.
Cargill didn't rule out the possibility it will shed some workers.

11/11 Wang revenues double but it loses over $11m in quarter, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, C6.
Wang has also reduced its work force by 2,170 people. It had announced a goal of eliminating 3,100 jobs by the end of the 1999 calendar year to reduce costs by $150 million to $200 million.
[Like so many others, Wang has found the shortsighted way to reduce costs AND its own markets.]

11/11 GM to combine over 40 engineering centers to cut costs - $1.5b plan creates 6 campuses to improve efficiency, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, C7.
"GM is still extremely top-heavy with its white-collar work force and they've got to have efficiencies of scale," said IRN Inc. analyst Jim Gillette.... GM expects to eliminate about 1.5 million square feet of floor space as a result of the move. No job cuts are expected, GM said. [GM is seriously into spin - plants have become "campuses" - as if employees are students who derive their livelihood elsewhere. Eliminate square footage but don't "expect" job cuts. Shades of the "cubiclization" of the late 1980s. Michael Moore must be getting a kick out of this double talk!]
The auto maker already has been consolidating its truck engineering and administrative employees from 11 sites into Pontiac's Centerpoint campus, which will have more than 13,000 workers and support personnel when the construction is complete.
[From campuses to consolidation camps to...concentration camps? As the French say, "Exploitation, exclusion, elimination." Must cut costs! Must raise executive pay and perks and stock prices for America's top 5%!

11/11 Stanley subsidiary planning to lay off 200, AP via Bos Globe, C9.
...at its Stanley-Bostitch plant in East Greenwich, Conn., over the next nine months, about 20% of the factory's full-time salaried work force. The job cuts come as the tool and hardware maker, in a cost-cutting move, transfers production of one of its product lines - collated nails - to plants in California, Canada, Mexico, Poland, and China. The price of steel needed for production is less in those regions and the company will also be able to save money on transportation costs, said Ray Martino, president of Stanley Fastening Systems.... The East Greenwich facility has 1,000-full-time salaried workers. Managerial staff, part-timers, and temporary workers add another 400 employees. Employees were informed of the layoffs Monday. The company will eliminate the jobs in stages, beginning in January, Martino said. Some of the employees will be able to transfer to other areas of the factory or replace temporary employees.
[In the future, all these planned layoffees will be transferred and kept employed - by cutting, not the workforce, but the workweek for the whole company (including top management) by 20% - from 40 to 32 - four 8-hour days. Everyone keeps their job, morale and productivity stay high, and Bostitch's market is not given another tiny vampire bite.]

[Now, an exception to prove the rule -]
11/7 IDX planning to hire 1,000 [over next 4 years], by Kimberly Blanton, Bos Globe, F1.

[Now back to the relentless beat -]
11/6 Spacetec to cut Lowell [Mass.] work force 50%, Dow Jones via Bos Globe, C7.
...to reduce potential redundancies after a merger with Labtec Inc....
[And, gentle reporter, how many jobs would that amount to, or is that a big secret?
[Interesting twist here - the majority Labtec shareholder, thru an affiliate, is Sun Capital Partners Inc. which is affiliated with a mgmt consulting firm hired by Spacetec which specializes in "turnaround situations" - i.e., downsizings and plant closings. Fascinating how these guys collude in screwing themselves out of any long term prospects. I guess they sure wouldn't be interested in cutting the workweek to 20 - that wouldn't give them the temporary stock fix they crave. More junk! More junk!]

11/6 N.Y. mill to shut, shift its work to Fitchburg, AP via Bos Globe, C7.
[Lordy, these boys will do anything to appear competent. How different from Daoism - "the sage does nothing, and yet nothing remains undone" or "cursed be he who must always be DOING".]
Plagued by declining business, a mill that makes outer layers for hardback book covers and leather-style covers for products such as diaries is shutting down and shifting operations to Massachusetts. About 100 employees of FiberMark Inc.'s plant in Beaver Falls, N.Y., were told Wednesday that the plant will close in the first quarter of 1999. The mill lost $4 million worth of annual business after its biggeset customer was bought this eyar by Rexam PLC of Britain.... Clsoing the plant should save the company $1 million annually after taxes.... The company said it will try to offer the plant's approximately 100 employees jobs at any of its nine other plants in the United States and Europe.
[Oh yeah, and will they pay moving expenses too, and possibly language-learning expenses, or just continue to starve their own markets by making those least able pay?]
Officials from FiberMark's Brattleboro, Vt., headquarters held four meetings Wednesday to announce the decision to the workers.
[Here's a nice touch - how thoughtful to all involved - get corporate suits from Vermont to announce to employees in New York that their jobs are going to Massachusetts - keeps it all nice and impersonal.]

11/3 [Dutch] Electronics giant Philips to close one-third of plants, Bloomberg News via Bos Globe, D4.
Philips shares surged...after the company said it will reduce the number of manufacturing plants to between 160 and 170 by 2002, from 226 at the end of 1998. The company [Europe's largest electronics maker,] has already closed 43 plants this year.... Philips's sales have stagnated as recession in Asia crimped demand and created a glut of low-cost electronics. That forced prices of Philips goods down 9% this year.... [CEO Cor Boonstra has also already] cut loose...Grundig,...PolyGram...and other [subsidiaries] he called "bleeders"....
[Ah, Mr. Boonstra, the major "bleeder" around here is you and your golf buddies who keep downsizing your own markets, a little here, a little there....]

11/3 BankBoston to cut 37 jobs at [recently acquired investment bank,] Robertson Stephens - Gloomy capital markets blamed, by Lynn Browning, Bos Globe, D5.
...While the layoffs represent a fraction of the investment bank's 925 employees, they reflect the degree to which global economic uncertainty has brought initial public offerings, foreign bond trading, and equity underwriting to a near standstill. The layoffs, which affect junior and midlevel executives...are primarily at...San Francisco headquarters....
[They also represent the unwillingness of toplevel executives to "sacrifice together, starting at the top" as Lincoln Electric does and where they can best afford it and where, in fact, the blame lies for concentrating wealth to unprecedented degrees and starving their own investments of markets. Top executives have ignored the increasing marginal efficiency of centrifuged wealth and now they are experiencing the diminishing marginal efficiency of concentrated wealth - the more concentration, the less circulation. They should have cut their corporate workweek 4% to 38.4 hrs/wk for everyone and minimized the shock, instead of cutting 4% of their workforce and maximizing the shock.]
The cutbacks also come barely two weeks after BankBoston said it would...cut 111 jobs worldwide [and three months after it] said it would lay off 114 staffers, mostly in domestic retail branches, and said more would follow.
[Here's another real brilliant strategy - laying off salespeople and marketers. Is that what our MBA programs are teaching these geniuses?]
The bank lost $45 million last quarter, primarily by trading emerging market debt that fell through the floor after Russia defaulted.
[Looks like Russia has finally found a way to beat us after all - using our own stupidity and greed - "financial judo."]

11/3/98 Citigroup stock falls after shake-up in management - Global investment banking unit plans to cut 60 jobs, AP via Bos Globe, D2.

Click here for downsizing stories in October/98.

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