Snip:
“ When Alex Hill and
40 of his colleagues were corralled into a conference room at Dell's
Austin, Texas, headquarters last November, he was a little nervous. "I
started cracking jokes that gas was going to start coming down in
James Bond fashion or something," he said.
Close.
Everyone in the room was fired, their jobs shipped overseas. While
Hill understands the business reasons behind what happened, the
38-year-old Web designer still feels betrayed. "It kind of felt
like I’d made a deal with my company that if I did a good job they
wouldn’t fire me," he said.
The slowing economy
has made such large-scale layoffs common. According to a new report
from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 3,489 mass
layoffs in the first quarter of the year, eliminating 559,000 jobs.
These big payroll cuts accounted for more than a fourth of the 2.1
million jobs lost during the period. Some areas of America are
feeling the pain of mass firings more than others.
To see who's been hit
hardest, we ranked metropolitan statistical areas by the number of
jobs lost through layoffs involving more than 50 employees during the
first quarter of 2009. Separation had to be for more than 31 days, so
as to exclude temporary furloughs.
Where's it worst?
Detroit,
where 57 mass layoffs snuffed out 14,781 jobs in the first quarter of
2009. Much of the pain came from the Big Three carmakers: General
Motors, Chrysler and Ford Motor. The
area has the highest unemployment rate in the country at 14%.
Chicago
runs a close second with 13,647 jobs erased in mass firings.
Construction-heavy Los
Angeles, also hurt by the Golden State’s financial crisis,
wiped out 10,594. Finance-focused New
York lost 8,688 during the first quarter of 2009. Houston
also made the list with 7,184 job losses; Dallas
had 4,784. Larger cities were
bound to get singled out: They attract big corporations with big
payrolls that require big cuts to make meaningful differences to
their bottom lines. At the state level, California
had the most mass layoffs with 115,014 workers let go, followed by
Michigan
with 46,817, Illinois
with 41,887 and Texas
with a more modest 33,005.
Mass layoffs put even
more strain on a city’s economy than gradual job cuts. Local
governments have to quickly find a way to help newly unemployed
workers. "You really don’t want to get hit with mass layoffs
because you now have a large number of people who need resources and
it really tends to overwhelm the public sector," said Joel
Naroff, an economist at Naroff Advisers.
In April, the national
unemployment rate hit 8.9%, and many analysts expect it to peak at
10% before it gets better. The unemployed face a job market where
employers can cherry-pick the best prospects without having to tempt
them with attractive salaries. "There is no bargaining power for
workers right now with unemployment so high," said Naroff.
Hill knows all about
it. With a wife and two small children to support, he's started his
own Web design shop. Looking for the bright side to his layoff, he
says, "I would never have started this otherwise."
1)Right now no one is truly
indispensable. Everyone has become expendable. It doesn't matter
what you do or how long you have been with your company. If your
boss believes the company would be better off without you, then you
have to go. It's very bitter for any no fault staff to face the
tough reality. With more and more companies issuing more and more
pink slips to their employees, the unemployment rate would be
skyrocketing. It would be very difficult for these jobless people
to find another job at this difficult time. Without job and income,
people might become very depressed and very violent as a result. If
the recession were going deep which I think it will, then the
economic meltdown might lead to social unrest and endangers the
social and political stability. It's getting very scary. No wonder
the business is booming at most gun shops across the United States.
It's ridiculous that people living in a country where law and order are respected have to buy guns to protect themselves in
this unprecedented economic crisis.
2)The Federal government spent
trillion dollars to bail out troubled banks. insurance companies,
auto makers... . But who's gonna bail out these jobless people?
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