Xmastime is Calling Bullshit

While the big Wall Street meltdown and Auto Industry bailout have hogged all our attention over the past few weeks, I'm sure I'm not the only one who notices that hardly a day goes by without some company announcing either it's folding or is making massive layoffs. Every day it's 20k jobs here, 15k jobs there, etc etc; we've all become somewhat inured to such news that used to be a big deal. After a while of this I started wondering about the timing of all these businesses making cuts. Now, of course someone who knows much better than myself can explain how all big businesses are intertwined in a macroeconomic way, and they'd probably be right, but I'm also wondering if some businesses are taking advantage of the overall climate and daily deluge of bad news re: layoffs et al, figuring out that if they thinned out their own payrolls now rather than some other time, they'd get less shit for it. "Hey, it's tough EVERYwhere, sorry!" That whether they really NEEDED to make cuts or not, jumping in on the layoff bandwagon would be a very savvy move, and the "ooh! oooh! me too!" tactic is the way to do it.

One recent "REally?" moment was the other day, when the NFL announced it was getting rid of 150 jobs. I mean for fuck's sake, the NFL? The NFL has made a billion dollars since you started reading this - are we to believe that laying off a measly 150 jobs is really gonna make a difference to the freaking NFL? Unless the 150 jobs is the entire NFC North, I find this hard to believe.

But then tonight I come across Bank of America announcing that they're cutting 35,000 jobs. At first I was like wow, that's a lot of jobs. But then I saw that it's actually over the next 3 years. So that's about 1,000 per month. Still sounds like a lot - but then I see that BOA has 6,100 bank offices. Now, I'm sure some whole offices will be axed, and whole groups of workers will be fucked. But you can also look at it as just 2 people laid off from each office over the span of three years. Which, to me, doesn't sound exactly horrific (unless, obviously, you're one of the two people.) Which leads me to wonder why would Bank of America 1) choose to make such an announcement, wouldn't this just be something that could gradually and quietly happen anyway? 2) why they're announcing it NOW. I would argue they're doing it now so as to throw their lot in with all the other businesses that are doing the same thing; giving themselves leeway to make as many cuts as they want and do whatever else banks do in as advantageous a manner as possible. In short, my spidey-senses are telling me some companies are taking advantage of the current economic climate and our collective empathy during these times and are cutting jobs when they might not really need to. Which I've prolly said about 4 times already, but hey.