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Sharp Overwhelmed By Volunteers For Early Retirement
jfruh writes "Sharp, the Japanese LCD supplier in dire financial straits, is trying to cut staffing by offering an early retirement package. Unfortunately, it seems Sharp employees are eager to abandon a sinking ship. The company was planning on cutting its headcount by about 2,000 employees with the move; instead, it had to cut short the program after getting nearly 3,000 applicants."
Let's just hope this doesn't make Sharp dull...
...pretty smart for the employees who applied, though.
Japan's demographics (older than most other countries as an average) do tend to skew things upward a bit on their own, but think about it - instead of getting laid off or cut off, you get a steady income and go work somewhere else at the same time (and even while searching for another job, it's at least something to subsist from).
Beats the hell out of getting a pink slip and nothing from the deal.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Why is this a bad sign?
Why should people in their mid 50's or older not be perfectly happy to stop working while still being paid? The company I work with is closing down the IBM mainframes and a lot of people are leaving rather than re-training. That comment about a "sinking ship" is totally missing the point, the ship may or may not be sinking but people who have 30 years of working no longer feel they have something to prove. Of course the retirement package on offer has to be adequate but this one certainly seems to be that!
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Beats the hell out of getting a pink slip and nothing from the deal.
So you're saying that Sharp has...sharp employees?
Ezekiel 23:20
Early retirement is one way to cut the work force – however, if done poorly it can lead to a brain drain. The more oversubscribed it is the more likely this will happen.
Also, you want to downsize as efficiently / cheaply as possible. The oversubscription suggests that the HR people could have gotten the size reduction they needed with less generous terms.
This is Japan. Their CEOs are known to take paycuts when the company tanks. This is a different culture. The retirees probably live with the children and raise the grandchildren. Sharp probably just has an aging workforce like every other developed country and the retirement package was good enough.
A lot has been written about Sony, especially in Japan where it was THEIR giant taking on the world. Sony USED to be a tech company run by techs. Googles 20% work on your own project sound nice? Pah! At Sony entire teams could work 100% on stuff that nobody knew could ever work. Then around the millennium a new guy was put in charge and he did not come up through the company as a tech but was strictly management. He too wanted to streamline the business and get rid of dead wood old engineers. It worked BRILLIANTLY. Not only was the package VERY attractive so all who could, took it but new jobs were waiting with little upstart companies like Samsung but I don't suppose you ever heard of them. Oh wait, isn't that the dingy Korean company that makes cheap Japanese knock-offs. Well, they can never compete because Japan has all the know-how locked up in job contracts... OOOOPS!
It was an epic brain drain and one Sony never really recovered from. It wasn't their only mistake but it was a hell of a nail in the coffin. Sharp did better, Sharp still has a reputation for Japanese made (and for the very old and very young, there was a time when Japanese made meant quality of an insane degree even the swiss found hard to beat. A Sony TV just worked, yes it was expensive but it just worked. And then management took over, streamlined the business and that stopped. Samsung quality is catching up but only because Japanese quality is going down.
Note that the asian giants on the rise are NOT streamlining their business and all the western ex-giants have streamlined themselves to dead. The simple fact is that pure managers can't see the next hit, the Walkman and the PS were things no manager could have seen. For sony to enter the console industry against the giants in that sector was considered insane.
When the techs left and management took over, Sony lost its edge. In the west people only know Sony the electronics giant same as say Nintendo. Did you know Nintendo once made a vacuum cleaner? Post WW2 Japan grew a tradition of little workplaces were people were busy trying to come up with anything to produce and export. Because with no natural resources and a devastated economy, that was the only way Japan was going to make money. Building thingies, firs cheap and crap, then cheap and okay and finally expensive and bloody good. And they did this at the cost of western companies that were to busy stream lining their businesses.
If your young, name a WESTERN TV maker. That actually still makes TV's. Every western household has a TV but who supplies them? The asians. Yeah, that worked out well, for the asians but the likes of Philips? Shadows of their former self as they focussed on their core compentency in existing shareholder meetings. PIty that it turned out loosing money is their core compentency.
You can see it with Hostess. I said it before, as a EU person I can't see the big deal, their snacks just ain't that good. When was the last time they extended their product range in a significant way? And I don't mean a chocolate twinkie but as a TV company, making a walkman, producing a game console. Look at how much flack MS is getting for daring to go into hardware. Streamlining your business is just another way of saying "we are closing down". In tech, the next big thing needs to be researched yesterday if you want to launch it tomorrow. Except the real time line is measured in decades and you will have many failed research projects in the mean time. But you got to do that if you want that massive hit.
Another reason that racing to the bottom never works is because there is always someone at the bottom waiting to take your place. Sharp can't keep in the display race, that just means the next iPad's displays will be all Samsung, now boosted by the free to hire Sharp engineers.
Surely Sharp knows the history of its major rival. Things must be dire indeed to follow the path of certain doom.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
When you offer an early retirement package and there's a mad scramble of people trying to take you up on it, the real danger is that you lose your best and brighttest. While it does get rid of headcount, it runs a real risk of losing people that you can't actually afford to lose.
Plus if the employees all want out, it doesn't say good things about their faith in the future of the company.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Maybe it's good for them. Kodak's retirees are getting the short end of the stick in the form of reduced payments so creditors get more money...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
But what galls me is that the employees are the most strident defenders of this system. Oftentimes it is the same employees who shout vociferously about freedom and liberty. They talk till cows come home about how the entrepreneur is the essence of America and how great it would be if everyone and their brother becomes a small business owning entrepreneur. But one of the significant impediment for starting a new business is the lack of healthcare at the initial phases for the entrepreneur and his/her family.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I told you, we're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to be a sort of executive officer for the week but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting.
I can two types of people who would jump at the chance for early retirement:
1) People actually close to retirement
2) People who are not close to retirement, but know they have the skills to get another job
The person who is barely scraping by at their job? Not going to jump ship (unless they are planning on changing careers). I see this as a fine way to lose some of the best and brightest really quickly.
Hell, every time our management talks about reductions or outsourcing my hand goes up. A nice package for leaving so I can coast for a couple weeks then look for a new job? Sure, sign me up!
(*) Actual socialism, of course, is worker control of the means of production, and has nothing to do with what Americans call "socialism" at all.
Actual socialism is workers having the illusion of having control of the means of production with the state having the actual control and screwing the workers whenever possible.
Actual capitalism is workers having the illusion of choice and freedom with the owners having the actual control and screwing the workers whenever possible.
lol witty one liners lol. Also capitalism failed at the beginning of C20, long before the Soviet experiment, but good luck trying to convince yourself otherwise while America continues creeping to the right and China's managed economy smoothly takes over.
Be quiet!!! I order you to BE QUIET!!!
But China is and authoritarian capitalist government nowadays, so capitalism has not failed at all. Actually it is the only economical system that works reasonably well.
What doesn't work is crony capitalism which is what US capitalism is becoming.
That definition of conservatism is limited to the American conservatives; in Europe, where the term originated, conservatives were far from fans of capitalism, much less of laissez-fair, and supported a controlling state with strong ties to the dominant religion (Catholic Church here in Latin countries), like in the "God, Homeland and Family" motto that was used here in Portugal.
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