Today Microsoft announced it would lay off 5,000 employees. These numbers hardly bat an eye these days, and many more people have been laid off from many more companies. There is one thing that caught my eye about these layoffs:
Microsoft also announced a $4 billion dollar profit for the quarter.
Microsoft is not in financial trouble. Its business remain healthy. This action was taken solely to pad their already substantial profits.
That is shameful.
It is one thing for a company in financial trouble and faced with huge losses to lay people off. I can understand that, for if a company goes out of business a much larger number of people will be out of a job. But what Microsoft has done goes beyond the pale and is all too acceptable in the last eight years of "anything goes."
I'm sure there have been other companies who have used the state of the economy as an excuse to pad their profits. Beyond the impact on these workers and their families, there is a larger impact on us all from these greedy companies. The workers who made this money for the most part spent it, feeding this money into the economy. Now it will either sit in Microsoft's mountain of cash or be paid as dividends to investors -- of which a disproportionate amount are wealthy. These investors are less likely to spend this money.
Obviously, government can't do anything to prevent these companies from taking such shameful actions. But I do wish our leaders would point out the callousness and shame them in public. We should ask our new President and congressional leaders to use the bully pulpit to call out this behavior.
Maybe it wouldn't help these workers at Microsoft, but a huge dose of bad PR might make other companies think twice about engaging in such callous behavior. If nothing else we should shout clearly and loudly that if a corporation wants to be a good citizen, this kind of behavior is unacceptable.