My work just made this announcement today:

[HughBeaumont]

Annual merit increases and profit sharing contributions will be suspended for this year.

Classic.

But hey, I suppose it's better than MORE job cuts . . . unless that's next.

Labor has absolutely no power at all in this country anymore. It's ALL about what we can do to please the rich people.

Is it going to take dragging some of them through the streets . . . To send a message to the remaining ones to START PLAYING BALL?

[Breeze54]

1. Much better than being laid off and I hope you aren't. 52,000 are in February

52,000 are in February, 52,000 are in February... that's just a mind boggling number to me!!

And many, many more in the weeks to come. My oldest sons got laid off in early Nov.

[HughBeaumont]

4. I kind of anticipated it . . .

. . . and I am lucky I'm not working for some publicly traded company whose first solution is to fire everyone if quarterly numbers aren't up to snuff. I think what this says is that they're just trying to ride bad times out with as little damage to the employees as possible, which I can understand.

It's just sickening that America was ever put in this position to begin with and I fully blame both the brazen greed of the American ultra-rich and the millions of useful idiots who said "yes" to that brazen greed, thinking it would trickle down on them. Free-market nutjobs need to wake up; it doesn't work.

[Vickers]

2. Ours made a similar announcement.

Funny, before all of this recent financial brouhaha we seemed to be doing OK, and the nature of our business is not so quickly affected by day-to-day ups and downs in the market.

It seems to be the consensus that this is simply a way to save some money, and not a true indication of our financial health.

All that said, I do feel awful about folks who are already affected by this mess, and I fully anticipate that it will impact me in the coming months.

[rsmith6621]

3. I Had The Same Announcement Several Years Ago

........We later found out the VEEP's and Prez/CEO received around 30 million dollars in sock options they could immediately exercise..




.......The good news.......I was out of work 9 months later.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

5. for us it was a little less severe

but you can no longer travel unless to a customer site without VP level approval and you have to be a little more detailed in your expense reports and they want us to track our time usage more closely (we all know what that leads to).

i expect layoffs for us to begin middle of next year without some drastic turnarounds...fortunately for me, i know where all the skeletons are buried so i have a good chance of hanging on... }(

sP

[stray cat]

6. Pay raises were canceled last year and this year probably as well

but that because the company is nearly broke like most companies.

[FarLeftRage]

7. They gave me a raise 2 months ago...

Then, one month after that, they laid me off...

I've been out of work now for 4 weeks and it sucks!

[HughBeaumont]

8. I feel you . . .

I was laid off at the beginning of Bewsh's country-razing for five months in 2001, no severance. During that time I had a whopping total of 4 interviews. Two of the last ones were with the company I work for now . . . and National City Bank (recently bought by PNC, soon to be laying off over half of their Cleveland staff). Thank God I dodged THAT bullet.

Think that things can only get better from here. I don't think it will be the depression some on here are predicting it will be, but this recession will be here for a couple of years.

[mnhtnbb]

9. Last November my son's software company promised there would be no layoffs

after the CEO and CFO were fired by the Board. On the first workday of 2008, my son and 3/4 of his tech support (helpline) department were escorted to human resources and out the door. Happy F*ckin' New Year!! Contract workers were hired to replace them while they finalized plans to move the entire function to India.

Better get your resume updated.

PS--My son's company was a privately held international software company with a lot of big name clients--The DoD and Boeing among them.