Monday, January 26, 2009

Business Bullshit Updated

A coupla months ago I posted re: my spidey senses tingling on the bullshit of so many companies unloading so many employees at the same time so quickly.
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.

A built-in excuse for unnecessary streamlining; making it that much easier for 5 guys at the top of a company to get an extra .004% return instead of keeping thousands of jobs alive.

And now today we're told about Pfizer merging with Wyeth to create a "drug behemoth," with Pfizer ponying up $68 BILLION for this. A maybe seemingly hopeful business move in this dark forest of late, peut-etre?

Then why is Pfizer about to cut 8,190 jobs, on top of 4,700 from last year? "Sorry, gotta cut jobs, gotta cut gotta cut...oh, snatch up our biggest competitor for $68B? No problem!!"

I'm not a business guy. I graduated Egg Foo Laude from a college that wasn't even the best school in our town of 7,000 people. I don't really have anything to lean on other than believing in my own brilliance even tho I ...oh, i already used the egg foo laude line.

Anyways. I hate to be a Pollyanna, but something stinks here and I question the validity of these drastic job cuts by companies. Look at the title of the article I linked: "Bloody Monday." Hmm. Really? Sounds a bit...MUCH, don't it? Or another example of the media pounding us with "crisis" so we become so inured to it we don't bother to raise a fuss no matter who/how many get axed? As I said before, "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."

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