Circuit City is firing 3,400 employees (8% of Circuit City's total work force) and bringing in lower-cost workers to fill their roles. The company says that the move is aimed to help realign its cost and expense structure. The move comes after Circuit City announced in February that it was closing 62 stores in Canada along with seven underperforming stores in the United States. Employees will be given four weeks’ worth of severance pay and will have the option of reapplying for their positions at a lower pay grade after a 10-week hiatus. Circuit City also plans to outsource its IT infrastructure operations to IBM in order to reduce costs by roughly 16%. This separate move will affect an additional 130 employees - 50 of which will become IBM employees while the other 80 will be fired.
I'm surprised more companies don't boot overpaid employees...not that I agree with it but it does get rid of the crappy employees.
I can see people starting to refuse raises for fear that they'll price themselves right out of a job.
That's why I stay on fry duty. Order takers with the .05/hr bonus will be the first to get the ax!
Firing workers based purely on their wage is possibly the dumbest thing a company can ever do. If they want to go that route, they should start at the very top. The CEO there makes $8.5 million per year.....which means they could fire his ass and pay each of the 3400 people they are going to fire an additional $25,000 per year.
I just do not get how any of these fucking twat CEO's of any company can be worth upwards of $1 million a year unless their stocks continue to surge at rates that cause them to split at least once a year. How can anyone talk about controlling costs when their salary is equal to 3000 employees?
Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can't figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I'll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I've been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them!
I just do not get how any of these fucking twat CEO's of any company can be worth upwards of $1 million a year unless their stocks continue to surge at rates that cause them to split at least once a year. How can anyone talk about controlling costs when their salary is equal to 3000 employees?
One of my customers is HD Supply. They just paid their outgoing CEO 210 million dollars to leave after he killed the stock. He was paid 24 million dollars a year in salary on top of that 210 million. As a result, the new CEO is paid 800,000 and if the stock does well, he can boost that up to 8.9 million. I hope more companies go this route, it makes more sense and makes CEO's a little more responsible for their performance.
Kilmoll the Sexy wrote:I just do not get how any of these fucking twat CEO's of any company can be worth upwards of $1 million a year
that is most likely because you are a largely uninformed plebeian with little grasp of how the free market works. if you don't offer corporate officers high salaries, you don't get attract them to run the company. a good CEO who assembles a good management team can earn the company way more than they are worth in salary.
The problem is that companies wait way to long to fire/dump a bad CEO.
My best first hand experience with how a large corporation operates was with Motorola. First, there was the inbreeding factor where somehow the son of the founder gets to be CEO (Galvin) and people think that somehow the son will be like father. (See the Arizona Cardinals Bidwills for another example of inbreeding issues with an organization).
Motorola was also too busy filling its quota of minorities and women in executive level positions to bother with whether they were qualified or good for the position. I'm not speculating here. I saw the reported percentages of women and minorities in Motorola (which was abysmally low) during a hiring process and the only minority that applied for the job was a virtual lock to get it. The problem was allowing the percentages too fall so low that it got to the point of even further hurting the company by grabbing anyone that fit the racial/gender profile to get the levels up to snuff. I have a huge problem with that but not with race/gender as my boss was female and the best I've ever had. Smart/Competent and kicked ass . At the same time, I had a female coworker that was a moron and had taken advantage of the system. What a fucking head case she was...she knew she was about to get fired so she went on medical leave for six months, at which point the company couldn't fire her and reassigned her after she returned to some useless position, wasting company money.
Motorola did know how to lay off it's workforce though! I was part of a 25% reduction in 2000. I walked away with about eight month's pay in severance along with stocks, vacation/sick pay, and my MOT 401K company matching fattening contributions. When you get that sort of severance package, you're not exactly too upset about your paid eight month vacation. The problem wasn't the employees though, it was the incompetent high level (VP level, of which there where a bazillion) management which unfortunately is realized long after the good people are laid off.
Large companies get way too bogged down. The number of organizational charts I saw at Motorola was astounding. In a way, it was fun to track down your name on them each time a new one was released. One new VP thought he was clever and changed all the org charts to "circle" charts...think of it as similar to Meet the Parents' "circle of trust". There was no structured organization, just overlapping spheres with names in them...lol...that VP didn't last long.
Motorola's also the place I witnessed the ultimate in retardation where, depending on your level in the company, you were allowed a window...and the people in a windowed office that weren't high enough in the company...had their windows boarded up! lol. Christ, how fucking asinine can you get?
Dregor Thule wrote:Does this mean Funk is out of a job or something?
Well, I stopped working there 5 or 6 years ago, so I'm safe. This isn't the first time that Circuit City has done this, they did it once while I worked there - the people they are firing now are the people that have been there since it used to be a comission job - and got moved to a high hourly wage when they did away with comission.
It also happened to be that these people were generally some of the best/most knowledgeable people at circuit city.
Kilmoll the Sexy wrote:I just do not get how any of these fucking twat CEO's of any company can be worth upwards of $1 million a year
that is most likely because you are a largely uninformed plebeian with little grasp of how the free market works. if you don't offer corporate officers high salaries, you don't get attract them to run the company. a good CEO who assembles a good management team can earn the company way more than they are worth in salary.
It's a safe bet to say that the ratio of good CEOs to bad ones is 10/90. Hell, that ratio is probably safely applied to nearly all board of director types.
