The Dole Awards

It has been a crazy end of Aught Eight and a beginning of Aught Nine. There have been some somewhere north of 400k layoffs since November 1st according to Forbes.com. There aren’t any jobs out there to be had; NY State has upped the weeks of unemployment benefits from 20 to 33. People now have unemployment for over half a year. This is incredibly helpful because there are no jobs to be had right now, and frankly, I like living in my apartment, so thanks NY State Government! Any way you look at it, things are frightening out there for people who are trying to make it through the daily grind. It’s hard out there for every person, whether you’re on the dole or not. There are very few jobs that offer stability. Even jobs in entertainment that are usually “recession proof” are feeling the impact. The way people spend money is changing, we’ll find out if it’s only for the time being or if it will be for the long haul.

This can be a terribly stressful time as well as a brutally depressing.

The dole isn’t here to remind us about how much this all sucks. It’s here to show us that we aren’t all alone in this (or at least you aren’t alone, I sometimes still feel alone)

It being February, and I being the obvious expert in unemployment blogging, I have been swept up in the awards season and have chosen my top 5 favorite layoffs from the end of ’08 and ’09 and compiled the first ever “Dole Awards”

#5 – Microsoft
1/22/09
5000 jobs

This one is very close to my heart. The reason I was actually laid off was because the company I was working for a company that was doing a show for Microsoft, but as it was apparent that there were going to be layoffs, and the fact that spending any money while people are getting laid became unpopular, they cancelled the show my company was working on. With the cancellation of this show, my company could no longer keep up the salaries of everyone. So with the lack of money and work, I was laid off, might as well just call it 5,001…

So what brought this up to the top 5 was the fact that they are laying off 5,000 people. It’s so low because they aren’t doing in one fell swoop, but they are crushing 5,000 over the next year. This is the first mass layoff in Microsoft’s history.

I know 5,000 isn’t a lot, and this is a bit of a sentimental pick, but what really sold me on Microsoft was something I read while doing my research. I read that Microsoft, amidst all their layoffs and cuts, are actually hiring more people over this next year. Seriously, you lay off Five THOUSAND people, and you start hiring other people? Don’t think you could maybe holler at some of those pinks with a transfer form, or perhaps a “request for resume” from another department? So we now have a bunch of people who weren’t necessarily “bad” at their job, that are now out of that job, and people who may not have had a job previously, now have jobs. Everyone follow? This seems backwards to me. Don’t get me wrong, I totally agree with that second part, but the first part is kind of bugging me out. I’m just saying; people who have jobs aren’t leaving those jobs by choice. If they are; then they are not smart, and probably not fit for work anyway. I’m just bringing it up.

My resume can be found on Monster.com