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Another Round of HP Layoffs
geekroot's dad writes "AP News is reporting that Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard is 'fighting to stay competitive with formidable rivals like IBM and Dell' and is announcing 5,900 European job cuts "to safeguard the future" of the company. From the article: 'Michel Destot, the Socialist deputy mayor of the southern France city of Grenoble - where HP has one of its French plants - said the layoffs were "unacceptable" and demanded that HP managers also meet local politicians to discuss scaling back the job cuts.'" This round following the first cut back in July.
Since local body is so interested in a company's staffing decision, couldn't HP threaten to lay off more employees unless it gets more tax relief?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
are STUPID.
HP will likely save as much in trimming those ~6k jobs as they did in getting rid of the 15k previous.
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
From the article: 'Michel Destot, the Socialist deputy mayor of the southern France city of Grenoble - where HP has one of its French plants - said the layoffs were "unacceptable" and demanded that HP managers also meet local politicians to discuss scaling back the job cuts.'"
Good luck pal. HP is a big multinational and doing business in France with French employees is a royal pain in the butt (yes, I speak from experience, having spent 14 weeks at my company's French subsidiary last year).
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Carly has only been gone all of maybe five or six months and you are complaining already? Please, give the new CEO a bit more time to undo the mess...
Or to safeguard the top management body bonuses? =D To the guys complaining of the 'red' french... well, you should study their economic and political model. It is different, it has drawbacks, it has advantages. It is not perfect, just as the US' system is not perfect either.
Disclosure: I'm stupid
I don't really see what companies like HP can do apart from streamline their business as much as possible, if they want to go down the same 'box-pushing' route as Dell. Even their printer business is being pushed hard by manufacturers such as Epson, who are willing to give up Linux and Mac compatibility just to lower prices even further.
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
Bad Earnings for Quarter -> ...
CEO Saves Money by Cutting Sales & Engineering ->
Better Earnings ->
Bonus for CEO ->
No New Products in Queue + Reduced Sales ->
Bad Earnings for Quarter ->
CEO Saves Money by Cutting Sales & Engineering ->
rinse, lather, repeat
In every company in trouble, everytime a change in the management happens, it seems to be customary for the new CEO/Chairman to layoff bunch of people.
Ofcourse, you need to lay off a bunch of hardworking people who had nothing do with mismanagement which led to the company's present status.
Why is it done? They have to come up with cash to pay the previous moron who drowned the company & also the overpriced present CEO & other management minions.
Idiotic, you say? You've much to learn about business, silly!
If it's the employees who make a company great, how can you safeguard the company's future by firing them? How do you then achieve greatness?
I think this is more about anorectic corporate theory (i.e. keep firing people to become leaner because you never no how grim the future might be! And shareholders like it, too!) than HP having too many employees. How sad.
Oh no! The Socialist Deputy Mayor of a French city is making demands! What will we do now???
Seriously, HP sucks, we all know HP sucks, and this is yet another round of cuts in the death spiral. That said, if it were, say, Chirac ranting about HP that would be one thing. The folks at the top in a country can make things pretty difficult for you if they want - it's generally good to keep them appeased at least to some degree. But who on earth cares what some obscure Deputy Mayor thinks about anything other than the Mayor's lunch order? Why does every minor insignificant politician have to weigh in on this crap? Do they really think that their constituents believe they have influence over giant multinational corporations?
Even if this Destot fellow had some clout, HP's response would likely be "fine - how about we take all the jobs away, then... And move them to another country!"
I actually mean this - I hate pointless layoffs (and was the victim of one at a previous company), but I hate grandstanding local political hacks even more.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
"to safeguard the future" of the company
They misspelled executives, offshoring operations(aka jobstealing), and stockholders.
That's not too high for a European country. Germany has hit much higher without breaking a sweat. The thing about the US's 6 percent unemployment being considered HUGE is that we have a much more fluid economy with much fewer social safety nets than they do. Whether you think it's a positive or a negative thing, it is generally harder to become destitute or unemployed once you have a job in a European economy, or at least that was my impression. On the other hand doing business is more cumbersome in a more highly regulated economy. It's always a trade.
I spoke to a Brit living in Germany for a while once, and he said, "Yeah, I pay taxes that are pretty high, but I don't have to pay for health care at all. What do you get for YOUR taxes in the states?" I had to agree- I don't get much other than frustration that I'm paying for a useless political circus and its associated pork barrel projects.
My little site.
HP executives will not be taking any paycuts or reductions (despite poor company performance) even though many of them make many times the annual salary of any of the people being laid off.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
carly trimmed lots of fat.
they gotta be cutting muscle by now, just to survive.
... hi bingo
Gone is a quality product from a company which cares about making quality products. Gone is the HP that cared more about hiring good engineering people than about quarterly projections.
Everone welcome in the HP that cares about shipping commodity product (read: crap) to customers whose success only matters in so much as they buy next season's overpriced plastic crap.
Welcome in the HP which lies to long term corporate customer about product lines (not online: pick up Sept. 5th ComputerWorld and read Don Tennant's column and the reader reaction).
Since the merger it's like HP sucked all the Suck out of Compaq's sucky products and injected it into HP products. Everyone thought the merger was a question of customer bases but clearly HP bought Compaq for the Suck alone.
HP: now with extra suckiness!
Me, what, rant? never,
-- RLJ
as wrongly captioned.
Should be "Countries with unemployment lying between 5 and 10%" The UK for example would be around the 4% mark, I feel that Norway *might* be in a similar position. Hence their anomalous colouration.
As for the rest, the former Soviet states are probably running under the old pretence of 100% employment and for the semi-industrialised Third World, the definition of employment is probably meaningless.
Full employment is a conceit of the G8 and their wannabee hangers on.
As for the article, French labour laws mean that Local Government DOES have a say in how a company (even HP) treats its employees. Seeing as HP probably took "Development Grants" to set up there, they're probably pulling out because the grants ran out. If HP management have the same blinkered attitude and limited knowledge of Europe as most Slashdotters do, they probably failed to notify the right organisations enough in advance before making their announcement. This would explain why the Frogs are huffing and puffing.
For the Americans who complain of the french 35 hour work week, and use it to explain the demise of the french economy and a host of associated profanities, I'd like to point out that Americans only do about 35 hours of work a week anyway.
Job surveys are pretty consistent: Americans waste at least an hour a day at work consciously fucking around on the internet, paying bills, etc.
So. Really, 5 hours is not that much time. The bigger problem is that all of Europe has high unemployment. It's a trade-off: less employment, lower inflation, higher benefits for their old, their sick, their poor. You're telling me you wouldn't pass up a bit of job security for full and free health care? It's not like us americans have job security anyway.
Besides, the ECB is committed to a wicked-low inflation target and that only means 1 thing: higher unemployment.
A system that has 5% unemployment vs. 10% or higher is more compassionate, is it not? How can you be compassionate if you can't compete? You end up with less ability to help the poor.
Yeah, I pay taxes that are pretty high, but I don't have to pay for health care at all
I've found that nothing in this life is truly free. A friend of mine has a mother that lives in Norway. She's on a 6-month waiting list for a necessary operation.
Sure, she doesn't have to pay for it. She just has to suffer with traumatic pain while she waits her turn.
"What do you get for YOUR taxes in the states?" I had to agree
Do you not use roads? Do you not use public transportation (which is subsidized by taxes)? Do you not use public water, public sewer, etc? Have you never called the police? I could go on forever. Your taxes are lower than the Europeans' taxes, and just because you don't get "free" healthcare doesn't mean you don't use governmental services. You use them every day.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Considering overall unemployment rates and economic performance as a whole, it sounds like the U.S. system wins out. Companies are very reluctant to hire people if it is overly difficult to fire them.
With the risk of sounding too anti-American (even for /.), this sounds truly cold-war-anti-socialist-pseudo-intellectual-econom ic-bullshit to me. After WW-II, the whole lot of western democratic Europe profited greatly from several forms of socialistic government. The fact that the economy had gone down-hill in the last few years says nothing about that.
The European economies have grown fast and heavy in the last 30 years, and are taking a break right now on the heels of the world economy, led by the US economy. Unemployment might be a bit of a problem these days, but in the west of Europe, poverty rates are MUCH lower than in the US.
Socialist regulations did that. And it worked for almost half a century. Look at the charts when you have the chance. We're now back at the same level as we were in 1999. That is not a big downfall. (btw, since 1999, all over Europe governments have reformed the socialistic regulations. Might just have been the wrong decision)
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
The American system has higher "performance", but which system has the greater compassion? You make the call.
Today, or 100 years from today? America's system has allowed 4% growth in real purchasing power per year since WWII. Europe's has allowed 2% growth. This means the the part of "standard of living" that's determined by what stuff you can afford in America doubles relavite to Europe every 35 years or so. Let's say the extra job security in Europe doubles your standard of living. OK, your ahead for 35 years and behind forever after.
Productivity and technology together make more difference in your standard of living than you might imagine, because it accumulates over the generations. It is more compassionate to be secure in your job, if it means you don't have the medical technology to save your child's life, as your system delayed the technology for most vaccines by 100 years?
It's not as cut-and-dry as you make it out to be. Higher productivity really does drive useful technology faster.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This is why prospective politicians should not be allowed to run until they have passed a basic course on economics.
And science. Maybe a little history. Art appreciation doesn't hurt.
I agree the employment numbers are cooked. But your figure is worse. Your figure assumes everyone wants to work. In other words, it includes stay at home mothers as a "deficit" in working people, when they are not.
Heck, it probably also includes the independently wealthy who definitely don't wish to work, don't need to, and are supported by their own income.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If the mayor is successful and forcibly prevents HP from laying off people, he'll be sending a strong message to other foreign corporations to avoid setting up an office in France.
It will be even more unacceptable when HP tells that mayor where he can stick it and pulls the rest of the jobs from the city (which given hp's current state of affairs was bound to happen anyway).
I think you need a more realistic perspective before you rant like that.
For a start, I challenge your assumption about "most successful people". It's well-documented that working long hours for extended periods provides rapidly diminishing returns, and ultimately becomes counter-productive as the damage caused by mistakes made while tired takes longer to undo later on.
About 35-40 hours is the most productive sustained hourly rate, and it's remarkably consistent across different industries and workers. You can get additional returns up to about 60 hours in short bursts, though they become less the higher the hours get. By about 80 hours, you're back to being only as productive as you were in the first 40 again as they additional 40 have cancelled out.
Go ahead and Google for this, or just try this article for a fairly representative comment. There are plenty of scientifically conducted studies, right back to Ford's observations about the guys building cars in his factory. The five-day working week came about in much the same way, BTW.
Next up, perhaps Mr Seventy Hours will be lazy rich in his 50s and living over there with a big house and car. The difference between us is that I will have lived for 50 years already when I get to my 50th birthday, and I won't die young from burn out.
Perhaps, but I'll take working smarter over working harder any day, and I bet I get there as fast as the butt-buster.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The interesting thing is that Americans have been subsidizing Western Europe's cradle-to-grave welfare systems for the last 50 years by footing the defense bill of the member states. Just imagine if the U.S. had pulled out of Europe completely during the cold war? I doubt the money for "free healthcare", et. al. would have been quite as easy to find when the European states would have had to begin allocating up to 15% of their budgets for defense instead of relying upon America.
It is comments like this that make me hope Rumsfeld follows through on his threat of pulling all American troops out of Europe.