only loosely related to Healthcare

[jpariury]

this was where our debate centered because i didn't look up the press release until after the debate. he said that healthcare reform was to blame for laying off the people because it was a foreseeable outcome, while i maintain that a company that does that is just throwing a temper tantrum, and in saying that the healthcare legislation made them do it is juvenile.

I don't know about juvenile. I suspect that much of the emotional invocation is more played by the media than a "if you do this, we'll do that" foot stomping kind of thing. And even then, I can't really fault the guy for saying it... his job is to ensure that his company has the greatest profit margin possible. Getting mad at him for saying that is like getting mad at lawyers for representing criminals. It's their dang job.

his standpoint was that taxing hospitals and manufacturers was counter-productive to keeping cost down, and would lead other companies to the same conclusion, lay off thousands of people. i personally don't see the connection between layoffs and taxes, because less employees mean less productivity and less revenue.

In a commodities industry where you're building something to sell that relies on manpower, that'd be true. In something more akin to a service industry, but with salaried personnel rather than hourly ones, you make up the slack by working people harder for the same amount of money. Ultimately, what it means is that the company will have greater costs overall, and still be required by its board of directors to maintain an "acceptable" (to them, not you or me) profit margin. That means reducing costs elsewhere (or, alternatively, requiring the company to sacrifice some of its profit margin), and often companies do that by reducing employees. Employees require not just their pay, but also the support costs as well, like rent to house them, electricity for them to do their jobs, supplies like desks and computers, etc. Cutting a hundred employees doesn't just remove their salaries from the costs, but the stuff they use to do their jobs as well.

Are layoffs inevitable? Not necessarily. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a few. And I don't know that that's necessarily a bad thing.

 

[dragonfire8974]

I guess that attitude still persists a little, but as the recession is dragging on that has already been the story of most companies, laying off employees and making the rest work harder, that has it's limits.

high profit margins is no excuse for crippling long term viability. I assume that price per unit could be raised 2% to keep the impact on profits marginalized, that or lay off 1000 employees... I guess I don't know too much about the business world, but a small loss in profits would probably be preferrable to the loss of an R&D department...

I know the business model, but I don't know the company so the math is hard to model with too many unknowns

 

[jpariury]

At that point, you have to look at what -actually- was said and done, and ignore much of the rest until it comes to pass, really.

On March 22, company says "we don't have any plans to lay off anyone"
On March 23, company's CEO says "well, we might have to, we'll see"

The increase is the equivalent of about 1000 jobs... how much, how many, and if it happens at all remains to be seen.

But that's not a particularly exciting news quote, you know? And, if you're someone who just kinda listens to the sound bites or headlines and doesn't quite read what is actually being said, you end up with a rather skewed pov. A good book to read might be It's Not News It's Fark to get an idea of how many ways news media screws things up, either intentionally or accidentally. It's a good argument for looking into the actual details rather than taking brief blurbs at face value.

That said, many people don't have the time or energy to focus on looking into things. Taking my wife, for example: she gets up around 7am every day and spends about 10 hours either getting ready for, going to, attending and paying attention to, or coming home from med school. Once she's home, she's either buried in books studying for an exam or prepping dinner from the moment she walks in the door until she goes to bed. Somewhere in there, she eats, spends some time playing Scrabble, backgammon, Yahtzee, or something with me, and maybe catches an hour of some show like House or what not as a break from everything else. On weekends, its mostly a lot of studying or house chores, and if she gets a weekend free, we like to go out and do stuff: catch a movie, play some frisbee golf, hit up an Alliance game, etc. Most of the politics and current events news she gets, she gets from me, which certainly skews things one way or another, regardless of how much I might like to think myself a fairly reasonable fellow, and what she doesn't get from me she might catch in a sound bite during commercial breaks during her one hour of not studying, or on the ride to or from school. And yet, come election day, she's supposed to have an informed opinion on a wide array of subjects? It just isn't gonna happen. I don't necessarily blame people for being uninformed. But that doesn't make their opinions right, either, and being informed isn't proof against being wrong, for that matter. But the people who are informed about things one way or another have a lot of competition for the public's attention, so they're going to resort to some method of getting done what they want done, and often will resort to hyperbole, bad analogies, and emotional arguments, if not outright falsehoods, to get it done.

 

[evi1r0n]

You're wrong, no you're wrong! There is no middle ground. I'm right, no I'm right! Everyone from your side of the fence is wrong! Rabbit season, duck season!!! Hehehe politics are silly.