Sun Microsystems to cut 10 percent of workforce

[Hannah Bell]

Sun Microsystems, maker of servers and database software, announced plans Tuesday to lay off 3,000 people ahead of its merger with Oracle Corp...

Heather Bellini, a securities analyst, told Bloomberg News that Oracle is likely to cut more jobs after the merger goes through. “We think it will be a lot higher than 10 percent,” she said. Oracle, Sun’s new owner, said it expects to return the company to profitability within a year by cutting workers and overhead...

The layoffs at Sun Microsystems are only the latest and most conspicuous of an ongoing series of mass layoffs. The New York Times announced Monday that it plans to cut 100 jobs in its newsroom, amounting to 8 percent of the total, by offering buyouts followed by layoffs. The same day, the Chicago Transit Authority announced that it was sending out about 2,000 layoff notices to bus drivers and other employees. The cuts will reduce the transit authority’s workforce by 11 percent...

Lexmark, the printer manufacturer...announced Wednesday its plans to cut 825 positions around the world...Meanwhile, Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant, is expected to cut thousands more jobs following its third-quarter profits announcement. Pfizer’s workforce fell to 75,400 at the end of September, down from 81,500 at the beginning of the year, suggesting that it cut more than 6,000 jobs....Caterpillar, the maker of construction machinery, likewise revealed, in connection with its third-quarter earnings, that it had cut 18,700 full-time jobs, and nearly as many temporary ones, since the start of the year...

Both Pfizer and Caterpillar meanwhile posted higher than expected third-quarter profits. Pfizer saw its earnings rise by 26 percent from a year earlier, while Caterpillar posted profits of 64 cents per share, far higher than analysts’ expectations of 5 cents a share.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/jobs-o22.shtml

[Anakin Skywalker]

1. Somewhere in this country...

some stockholders are very happy.

Sick! This is the great "free market" that CONservatives love to espouse: Some people (the rich) profiting and laughing their way to the bank at the expense and misery of the others (the working class).