Oracle Dumps PeopleSoft Employees

curtain writes "The first move in Oracle's dismantling of PeopleSoft has begun. The cuts will affect about 9% of the 55,000 staff of the combined companies. From the article: "We're mourning the passing of a great company," Peoplesoft worker David Ogden as saying. Other employees said they would rather be sacked than work for Oracle."

Comments

Welcome to Corporate America

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Corporations are not a democracy.
2. Corporations do best for the shareholders.
3. The majority shareholders are mostly a small group of already wealthy people.
4. Aquire companies with "leveraged synergies".
5. Fire redundant pawns. Feed jobs overseas.
6. Lower competition.
7. Handfull of shareholders get even richer at the expense of thousands of families and the business es they patronize.
8. Most people and the local economy lose.

Welcome to the American Way. /waits for the revolution

To clear up some misperceptions

[afabbro]

There seem to be a few misperceptions here about what's happening.

IT people are not being laid off. Back-office people are being laid off. When you merge two companies, you wind up with two payroll departments, two HR departments, two legal departments, two accounting departments, etc.

Fifty years ago, you mostly kept everyone because everything was done manually. Today, if you have a (computerized) payroll system that can handle 40,000 employees, it can probably handle 55,000. If it can't, you generally add more hardware/IT resources, not more people. The same thing is largely true about most back-office jobs.

So, what do you do with thousands of redundant people? It's not realistic to think that you can retrain them all, or that they all want to be retrained ("hey, mister SPHR-certified HR specialist with 20 years' experience, here's a book on Java!")

The people who usually survive mergers are (a) people in the acquiring company, (b) people in the acquired company who are responsible for making/developing the product, and (c) good salespeople in the acquired company. That is certainly the pattern here.

I'm not saying that Oracle/Ellison is some lilly-white invisible-glad-hand or that the Oracle-Peoplesoft merger is a good thing...just saying that is the way it works in business and this wasn't really any surprise. This notion that "Wall Street loves job cuts" or "corporate America is so short-sighted" etc. doesn't survive that "well, what would you suggest instead?" test.