The Weekly Layoff Report: Feb. 13, 2009

[MacBeth]

Klaus Kneale, 02.13.09, 05:20 PM EST

This week 32,000 jobs hit the chopping block. The layoffs keep coming.

Here, highlights of the week's activity recorded by the Forbes.com Layoff Tracker, which counts the layoffs at the nation's 500 largest corporations.


Emerson Electric Co. (nyse: EMR - news - people ) had a workforce of 141,000 last October. It plans to get down to 120,000 by the end of this September--about a 15% cut. Part of that is a 14,000 worker layoff announced Monday. That was the largest cut of the week.

Emerson has been struggling with weak appliance sales. Its stock is down 40% over the last 12 months, and the company posted a 19% drop in profit for its first fiscal quarter this year. Even Emerson's top executives are taking pay cuts, between 3% and 7%.

General Motors (nyse: GM - news - people ) announced the second-largest layoff of the week at 10,000. The move is part of restructuring the automaker is instituting as it tries to qualify for federal bailout money and avoid having to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Roughly a third of GM's layoffs will happen in the U.S., and pay cuts and freezes will further reduce the company's spending. The deadline for submitting a viability plan to federal officials is Feb. 17.

Caterpillar (nyse: CAT - news - people ) continues even more downsizing despite having announced 20,000 layoffs on Jan. 26 and another 2,110 on Jan. 30. This time it's offering early retirement packages to some 2,000 production workers. With demand for its heavy machinery way down, the company has also frozen hiring and salaries, cut back overtime, slimmed executive compensation and reduced factory operating hours.

General Electric (nyse: GE - news - people ) is cutting 1,550 workers. They're coming from its transportation arm, which makes heavy machinery much like Caterpillar's. GE Transportation's chief executive officer, Lorenzo Simonelli, offered the sort of comment we've been hearing all too often: "The overall economic downturn is substantial, and we at GE Transportation are not immune to the global recession."

Nike (nyse: NKE - news - people ) stepped in this week to announce with little detail a cut of perhaps 4% to its workforce of 35,000. That could mean upward of 1,400 workers. The company may also start to tighten its ad spending, which has been fairly liberal in the past.

United Technologies (nyse: UTX - news - people ) subsidiary Pratt & Whitney Canada announced a 1,000 worker layoff (about 10% of it workforce) this week. The jet engine maker has suffered a decrease in orders. Pratt & Whitney announced 350 pink slips at the beginning of December.

FedEx (nyse: FDX - news - people ) has had to cut 900 jobs in its freight unit because of weakness in the bulk-shipment business. But that's only 2.6% of the division, a modest layoff by today's standards.

Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ) cut deep this week, dismissing up to 1,200 employees. About 800 are leaving its headquarters as the retailing goliath attempts to slim and reorganize its corporate structure. The other 400 come from the closing of a product-return center in Georgia that wasn't performing well enough.

Other lesser players in layoffs: W.W. Grainger (nyse: GWW - news - people ), 400; U.S. Airways Group (nyse: LCC - news - people ), 233; and News Corp. (nyse: NWS - news - people ), 65.

The Forbes.com Layoff Tracker, updated daily, currently counts 415,439 layoffs announced at America's 500 largest public companies since Nov. 1, 2008.





www.forbes.com/2009/02/13/layoff-unemployment-jobs-leadership-careers_0213_tracker.html

[oskar]

And my son hits the full time job market in 2 months.

[MacBeth]

One of the conglomerates above owns my corporation - and the reason we are closing divisions, both here and in China. There has been a directive to reduce head count by geography (of course, missing the obvious review of talent and skills and selecting on that criteria).

Really large concerns that are holding their own are reducing now because they can and because the remaining employees will be very grateful to have a job and will not complain about doing the work of 1-1/2 employees at a reduced rate of pay. They are doing it because they can do it without fear of bad relations because there are companies that are forced to do these things.

My corporation held on to treating employees well until this directive and the new President (took the position 4 months ago) were imposed on us.

While I hate the idea of not having a job in a few months and trying to find another one then if there is one to be had, the fact that the company I worked for these past 14 years has been forever changed. And that will make it some easier to let it go.