On The Dole: SPECIAL REPORT!

This timing was just too perfect.

Due to the fact that I do not understand the comment section quite yet, I wanted to make sure that this was put front and center in this blog.Thank you to Helen for pointing this out, we now get double blog bonanza to start week 5. Awesome!

MSNBC.com via The Associated Press is reporting that due to a (oh, this is so perfect) "software glitch" (HA!) Microsoft paid out too much severance to some of it's laid off employees.

Microsoft is obviously making a strong play to raise their status in this year's Dole Awards. Unfortunately for them voting has closed or else they might have moved all the way up to 3. I do have a little bit of clout around here, so I wanted to give a specific Honorable Mention to this act of simple foolishness.

Is this seriously happening?

A software company lays off a few thousand people, and the software that calculates the severance overpays those that have been laid off.

It's all topped by the fact that they are asking these employees for the money back. They sent a letter to the employees that were overpaid asking for reimbursement by check or money order within 2 weeks.

...Check or money order.

As if being laid off isn't actually difficult enough right now, they are now saying your severance was too much and they want you to return it. That is such a kick in the nuts to all those people. I would make a decree that if you are provide a service, and the service screws something up, then you are the loser. You get no mulligan. That is your own fault.

I think coming after the layoffs is the best part. It looks to me like they laid off the wrong people, or they didn't lay them off soon enough.

I look forward to the end of the 2 week deadline. I want to see how many money orders they get.

Keep it classy Microsoft.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29353191/

The Dole Awards #4 – Best Supporting Layoff

This award is in recognition of a company with major layoffs, that by themself aren’t crippling, however when compiled with the already weakened economy will do severe damage and will serve to breathe more despair into this already crumbling economy and keep this recession continuing strong.

And the winner is …

#4 The Las Vegas Sands Corp Company (LVS)
12/23/08
11,500


This one is a bit of a dark horse. They doubled up Microsoft, but didn’t crack the top tier of layoffs based on the numbers. According to forbes.com laid off 11,500 people from the Las Vegas Sands on December 23, 2008. Classic Christmas style layoffs here and that really helped them get over the top and beat companies like Caterpillar and AT&T for this award. There is nothing that will ruin your Christmas and subsequent new year than a pink slip on the 23rd. Classic move to try and soften the blow of a happy christmas. In my opinion not enough companies use this tactic.

The Las Vegas Sands Corporation owns six properties in all, two of these properties being in Las Vegas, one being the Venetian and the other being the Palazzo. The beauty of this set of layoffs is two fold.

First we have the layoffs in America. They boast that this is less than 2% of the layoffs on the strip, and The Sands Corp. have been congratulated for hanging on so long while other Resorts and Casinos began cutting jobs much earlier in the recession. However, with these layoffs coming as well as those that will undoubtedly be in the future, there are those that are worried about the region being able to bounce back as a tourist destination. This is amazing to me because that’s all that Las Vegas is. Without the casino’s it’s just a desert that nobody wants to go to. With all these cuts and the public fear of spending money we are looking at places that are tourist destinations that will be hit incredibly hard and will be recessed even after the rest of us start to pull ourselves out of this economic slide. The concern is that all these cuts will cause service to suffer and hurt the regions ability to bring in tourist. UNLV Gaming Research Director David Schwartz is quoted on klas-tv.com saying “So what if someone comes here on one of these really good deals and finds that the place is a mess. They are probably not going to come back when they have enough money to travel anywhere they want and pay top price.”

The other half of this equation is the international side of things. The Sands Corp. has stopped construction in Portuguese territory. This will halt a project that is worth 12 Billion dollars. Additionally, they have put on hold some operations and projects in China. Since I read “The World Is Flat” I understand how important this is in our society. We are now not only dealing with these layoffs and this roll back of spending in the state, but also in our global economy. We have seen recently that the rest of the world has started to falter since we’ve been in this recession and this is just another level of that. With everyone in America trying to hold onto whatever money they can get their hands on, this is going to cause ripples throughout the world. Right away we see that these layoffs affect Asia and Europe, and this was only one resort chain.

So 11,500 is not a catastrophic amount of layoffs in the grand scheme of things, but its domestic and global implications get it an inaugural Dole Award. Congratulations Sands Corporation, welcome to the top 5.

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