I never thought I would say that Gov. Schwarzenegger has a good idea, but he does. If every state and every company (including banks), would stop cutting employees and cut employee hours for everyone (two Fridays a month or more) and cut overhead costs, tons of money would be saved by all. Outsourcing should be dropped in favor of keeping employees. For salaried employees, this would mean a pay cut equal to the number of hours cut (easily calculable). This would eliminate the need to pay unemployment and keep those people insured as well.

When you have a wound you can heal it, when you cut off an arm or leg, healing is a much bigger job and often requires more resources. Keep everyone working and there will be fewer people collecting unemployment, fewer people defaulting on their credit payments, and fewer foreclosures!

Encourage telecommuting as it saves office space, electricity, gasoline, and the environment just to mention a few things.

The reward for these companies and companies that bring back the employees they laid off, should be a giant tax cut – talk to the companies to see what they need. EVERYONE BENEFITS!

And another major argument against lay-offs are the fact that when people are let go, companies lose hard to replace people with skills and knowledge that may go to competitors. When business picks up, it costs a lot of money to recruit, hire, and train new people.

Lay-offs are often short sighted band-aids to increase shareholder returns and executive bonuses. Sometimes they are necessary, but corporations are way too quick to use them. Leaders often forget my earlier point that employees make great customers. Laid-off people can’t afford to be anybody’s customers.

Atul
http://www.thingsivenoticed.com

You obviously don’t run a business. When you have excess capacity and you don’t anticipate any turn around anytime soon, layoffs are the logical and efficient thing to do. If you don’t have layoffs, people would just sit around doing nothing while collecting money. It’s better for them to find another job where they’ll be more productive. To do otherwise is socialism.

When people leave their jobs, they don’t cash out their 401Ks. Doing so would incur 10% penalty plus taxes. They generally leave it where it is (they usually allowed some amount of time) or roll it over to another 401K or IRA plan. Of course, if they can demonstrate financial hardship, they can withdraw without penalty.

It’s a time tho when I am grateful to be working for a locally owned non-union family business. There may be hours adjusted, but no one will be losing health insurance by being laid off. They are truly caring about the families that their employees are supporting and see the need to keep everyone working as much as possible. They know when the upturn comes, they will need their people back full time and overtime, so they are willing to ride it out.

They are actually encouraging me to go back to 40 hrs instead of the 33 I work now…. not gonna happen in my world as I want the time off with my grandkids, but nice to know it is there if I needed it.

My company just axed 10% of its workforce yesterday. I think you may be onto something; but the problem I see is that companies sometimes lay people off for short term benefits. It’s about how do we stay profitable THIS YEAR? How do we make our debt payments NEXT MONTH?

They’re not looking at the long-term economic picture–they’re not even looking at their own company’s long-term picture.

Finally… isn’t “naysayers” one word?

Jerry

If companies keep laying people off, they shrink the customer pool of potential buyers of their own products! This may not be so true of thing like soap and jeans, but it is very true of large purchases like major appliances and cars.