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Alcatel-Lucent Cuts Go Deeper — 7,500 Jobs Gone and Counting
Dawn Kawamoto writes "Alcatel-Lucent has cut 7,500 jobs since the start of the year — a couple thousand more than what employees of the embattled telecom equipment maker may have been expecting. Last summer, Alcatel-Lucent said it expected to cut over 5,000 jobs by the end of 2013. Well, cuts have gone deeper than that, and the company's newly minted CEO, Michel Combes, told Wall Street during the second quarter earnings call Tuesday to expect additional cuts and the related cost savings in the coming quarters."
"expect additional cuts and the related cost savings in the coming quarters"
What about the coming years? I'm not familiar with this particular situation but I've seen plenty of companies happy to give up everything in the long term for short term gains to satisfy Wall Street. Is that the case here?
Big corporation reduce workforce to increase profit. At some point they will produce everything for cheap using abroad subcontractors. That means a lot of money goes straight to shareholders without having any chance to go in workers' pockets. And since workers are also consumers, this badly impact the economy
At some point we will need to find a way to tax the profit and reinject money in consumer's pockets so that they can purchase the goods produced.
For companies with a "well-established" product line, legacy systems are often essentially "free money", especially for telco equipment with embarrassingly long lifetimes.
Screw the employee, pay the shareholders.
After they fire you they'll raid your savings and 401k, sink your mortgage under water, and let you go without viable medical options.
Profit for few at the expense of many. That the corporate way.
Time to eat the rich and banish k street.
That the pbx and carrier level gear that they make is built to last 30 years or more. Kind of hard to up-sell when what's in place will provide decent service for that amount of time.
And having administered quite a few at&t/Lucent PBX's like Definity and Prologix, I can tell you I've NEVER seen one fail. Some have been in place for the better part of three decades now and they are still going strong.