Last week, the Chicago Reader laid off four of its best journalists: John Conroy (previously), Harold Henderson, Tori Marlan, and Steve Bogira. The cuts almost certainly mark the beginning of the end of the paper's role in Chicago as an investigative force and a corruption watchdog. The New York Times responds with a salute to Conroy and a defense of muckraking's relevance.
posted on Dec 11, 2007 - View this thread

Stupid Management Tricks at Circuit City. Is your retail electronics company losing money? Want to cut costs? Then how about firing some of your people? I know! How about singling out those store workers who are making too much -- 3,400 of them, and get them to reapply for the same job at a lower wage?
posted on Mar 28, 2007 - View this thread

IBM is laying off people in Burlington, Endicott, Rochester and Austin today. The presumptive reason is Indian outsourcing — some employees have posted that they were asked to train their replacements. Why hasn't this made the news?
posted on Sep 8, 2006 - View this thread

AOL Kills Netscape AOL "has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape (they’ve even pulled the logos off the buildings)." According to some former Netscape employees, "everybody in CPD is getting laid off." Meanwhile, Mozilla goes on at the new Mozilla Foundation. [via Zeldman]
posted on Jul 15, 2003 - View this thread

Applied Materials to Slash 14% of Its Work Force How many of you work in the Silicon Valley semiconductor business? How do you feel about an industry giant like AMAT having yet another layoff? Or, if you work for one of AMAT's competitors, what does this do to your own sense of job security?
posted on Mar 17, 2003 - View this thread

Shooting the messenger. "The Bush administration, under fire for its handling of the economy, has quietly killed off a Labor Department program that tracked mass layoffs by U.S. companies." (via madamjujujive)
posted on Jan 4, 2003 - View this thread

Get laid off in public. Vanguard Airlines suspends operations; posts its system-wide pink slip on its HOME PAGE for you all to see. "Wages and salaries owed you as of today are "prepetition wages" and likely will not be paid for a matter of months, if not longer.... Any Vanguard stock you hold (including stock purchased in the Employee Stock Purchase Plan) is almost certainly worthless and it is likely you will be entitled to claim a capital loss on such stock this year." But not all is gloomy: the CEO "wish[es] you the best in your future career. You will be in our prayers." Aww, shucks.
posted on Jul 30, 2002 - View this thread

Verisign to lay off 10% of its workforce. I don't have anything to substantiate my intuition (other than the supposed 'insider' info posted here, which now seems to be highly prescient), but I have a gut-wrenching fear that Verisign is going to go POOF soon. If it does, what will happen to the 'net as we know it?
posted on Apr 25, 2002 - View this thread

The world of the laid-off techie. "Human resource experts say the underemployment trend in the current economic cycle is just starting to emerge. Many workers got the ax when mass layoffs peaked in the summer and fall of 2001, and they coasted on several months of severance and unemployment insurance, which generally lasts six months. With the tech job market still in the doldrums, they're now considering new gigs as waitresses, bartenders, forklift drivers or baby sitters--anything to pay the rent. " I wish the media hadn't/didn't focus so much attention on the suits who seem to only be able to "fail upwards" versus the folks in the trenches. (via /.)
posted on Feb 11, 2002 - View this thread

LaydOff is from former employees of Enron, saying that they "would like to be the forum to expose financial and cultural abuses of corporate power by providing apparel to express our distaste for apparent unethical and unwanted behavior." Right now they're just selling t-shirts. Ted's Turnovers was another (more vitriolic) site started by laid off workers.
posted on Dec 14, 2001 - View this thread

You know those exploited Nike workers in Indonesia we hear so much about? Good news and bad news: the good news is, a bunch of 'em aren't being exploited anymore. The bad news is, it's because they were laid off.

Local manufacturers blame the soft economy on the WTC attacks, so yes, even this ends up being a WTC post. You cannot escape.
posted on Oct 8, 2001 - View this thread

Boeing lays off approx 30,000. Wow...in my neck of the woods, this is a big deal. Combined with yesterday's stock losses, and potential airlines bailout.... (more inside)
posted on Sep 18, 2001 - View this thread

As the technology industry lays off thousands, a division of the German conglomerate, Siemens, takes a different approach. I like the idea of having a sabbatical of sorts with half pay instead of simply being laid off. Of course, this would never happen in the U.S. - we love laying people off here and contributing to overall unemployment and higher welfare rates. Just look at what Salon has to say about it.... (note, you need to scroll down to midpage).
posted on Sep 5, 2001 - View this thread

More proof CNN layoffs have screwed CNN.com "Completely destroyed?" (Paragraph 3) Man, I learned not to use that redundancy in freshman J-school. Geez. Turn out the lights, Ted, the party's over.
posted on Mar 12, 2001 - View this thread

Schadenfreude update: eToys has officially announced it will file Chapter 7 and liquidate in 5-10 days. And, as expected, Disney started Round 2 of layoffs from its cash-hemmoraghing operation, this time gutting ABCNEWS.com and ABC.com. Predictions as to who's next?
posted on Feb 26, 2001 - View this thread

The Layoff Binge The last piece on the page gives a worker’s perspective on the recent attack in the Class War.
posted on Feb 15, 2001 - View this thread

eToys announced plans today to fire its remaining 293 employees. However, the company plans to continue exploring alternatives to closure.
posted on Feb 6, 2001 - View this thread

51,631 dot com layoffs as of Feb. 01, 2001. Is it that the web allows us to simultaneously view the usual failure of 99% of new businesses, a sign of the coming recession, or just a result of bad business plans and get rich quick schemes? Or was it simply too good to last? Whatever the reason, it's depressing.
posted on Feb 2, 2001 - View this thread

Amazon.com to cut 1,300 jobs. Is this the beginning of sustainability for Amazon? Or is it the beginning of the end?
posted on Jan 30, 2001 - View this thread

While IjustGotFired.com seems to be in full-swing, handing out free @ijustgotfired email addresses to the many people who are finding themselves being cut in the world of lay-offs, the site's founder, Wrybread, of WryBread.com fame (a great site to waste enormous blocks of time at, looking at fun-but-useless mayhem type of stuff), has been unusually quiet with his own site since November.

Anybody in the S.F. area know anything about this? He didn't walk perilously close to the edge of the Earth and fall off, did he?
posted on Jan 30, 2001 - View this thread

Etoys to lay off 70% of its workforce in their never ending quest for profitability. Does it really take 1,000 employees to run an e-commerce site? I hope not, since there will only be 300 left after today. I imagine most of those employees were in the fulfillment end of the business.
posted on Jan 4, 2001 - View this thread

Isn't it ironic: Imagine Media, publishers of Business 2.0 and other mags, have laid off 21 of the 26 people in thier online operations. Incredible quote: "...the layoffs stem from Imagine's failure to realize what was happening in the Internet space."
posted on Dec 4, 2000 - View this thread

For those who like to watch carcrashes but don't want to patronize that site with the vulgar name, The Standard maintains Dot Com Flop Tracker, Dot Com Layoff Tracker, and Dot Com Ex-Exec Tracker.
posted on Oct 7, 2000 - View this thread

Corel lays off 320. Why wasn't Michael Cowpland one of them? Why does that man still have a job at that company?
posted on Jun 8, 2000 - View this thread