My mother worked for a subsidiary of a certain $87 billion a year health insurer. They are closing the office she worked at this month and firing [edit: "laying off"] all the employees.
Assuming who I think it is, your mom isn't the only one. A lot of their subsidiaries are being sold off. I'm assuming less attractive ones are being shut down if they can't find buyers. I'm consulting for a firm that has bought one of their subsidiaries as a new business unit.
Much of it has to be done before the end of the year, per the US government. Haven't dug into why that is the case just yet, but I'm aware of much going on with said health insurer.
My own understanding of what "firing" meant was termination because, essentially, the employer didn't like the employee anymore, usually because they did something "wrong". Whereas if a batch of employees had to be let go, ostensibly purely for financial reasons, nothing very personal or direct, then they are "laid off", not fired. Every once in a while I hear somebody say fire when I think it was layoff, and it irks me a little. Firing generally means "you suck" whereas laying off means "we suck" or "the economy sucks". I hope that's how we collectively use those terms anyway. Because if we instead use them to mean the same thing, it's a waste of words. A distinction without a difference.
(Not criticizing what you said directly, just reacting to that term.)
If you're in the business of concealing responsibility, then by all means, use the word "lay off".
Employers like to use "lay off" to imply that it was not the fault of the management team, it's not because they're bad guys, it's just the unfortunate reality. That's partly true, it's partly bullshit, and the fact is that it affects people profoundly, and calling it a "lay-off" doesn't help things.
Employees who have been terminated like to use "lay off" to imply that it wasn't their fault, to avoid impacting their hireability. But if the ex-employee had been a net asset, they wouldn't be laying that ex-employee off, unless they were liquidating the entire company.
In practice, lean times give management, whether soft-hearted or black-hearted, an opportunity to make hard calls, in the equityholders' favour, at the expense of the employees. You can like that, hate that, whatever.
I prefer to eschew both "lay off" and "fire", and use the word "terminate", as in "one employee was terminated yesterday, and two thousand were terminated at some point last month". I do this in the hopes of being starkly clear about the simple fact of the termination, and avoiding the sugar coat. You can also use "terminated with cause", which is a legal distinction in some jurisdictions, and I think it's an interesting one.
Oh, but... if I wanted to start a thread that contrasts threads called "who's hiring", then I'd be clever and rhyme and call my thread "who's firing". And if I were responding to that thread, I'd use the word in the topic question. And I wouldn't whip out the pedantry unless someone else did it first.
"lay off" says it is the fault of the management team.
"fire" says it is the fault of employee.
In the US, the standard is employment at will, which means you can terminate without cause at any time (unless you are actually terminating for a disallowed cause, confusingly), so "terminated for cause" is a small minority of "fired".
Of course, within those people who are more or less interchangeable, of course the ones let go are the poorest value, but there's a significant gap between someone who was let go because the company wanted to reduce the number of engineers they employed and someone who was let go because he is incompetent and the employer turns right around and starts advertising to replace him.
Layoffs still work like that sometimes, especially in manufacturing.
It makes sense if, say, you work at a supplier for Ford, and Ford slows their production temporarily, so they don't need the part you make. So you get laid off for a month or two, knowing Ford will gear back up eventually and start ordering more parts.
That doesn't happen in most industries. But even if it did, who's going to want to sit on their heels without an income hoping they'll be brought back in?
I know that it happens a lot in seasonal industries like tourism. Especially where there's no other industries. If your state/country has a pretty comprehensive social safety net (like here in Quebec), it's not unheard off.
This is a trend going through large Canadian businesses right now.
They seem to think that by outsourcing work to overseas mills that they can save money. Sales and support aside, it's the companies that are outsourcing engineering that are really hurting.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I work for a "global organization", and the people we hire in the US are just as incompetent as the people we hire in India. (We have good people in all the locations too, of course... but living in the US or UK or Canada does not mean you are going to do a good job.)
I love it when someone emails support and gets an answer like "plz read wiki"... and then you realize the person that wrote that is a white dude from Chicago that speaks no languages other than English. I can forgive lazy writing if English is not your first language. But if it's your only language, please spell please correctly and use "the" when appropriate. A complete sentence would also be nice.
The outsourcing of activities generally has less to do with quality than with cost. Of course, the cost is relative too.
A company I used to work for outsourced a large chunk of the work force to Poland. Poland was chosen because they were technically sound, generally, spoke above-average intelligible English and, most importantly, valued the American dollar about 6 times more than we do.
This meant, generally, that they could hire 6 Polish workers for every American worker we laid off (if you ignore the fact that many of the American workers were longer in the tooth, and hence higher on the salary scale, which made it even more profitable a deal.)
The main worry about moving somewhere with an economy that isn't horribly weak is that as our American dollars infuse their economy, and more Polish outsourcing companies are stood up to attract more American dollars, we inflate their economy. The cost of living goes up, the value of our dollar becomes less strong, and the benefits to having moved work there becomes less appealing. This could well lead to a tipping point when American companies pull out, which I worry could 'burst the bubble' and leave Krakow Poland in worse shape than if we'd never been there.
This is the exact same plan for 3 major Canadian oil-n-gas I know. Details are unfolding, but many will be affected.
Basically, individual contractors are to be replaced by fewer BigName companies with work done overseas.
The bossman really doesn't like it when I specify, but googling largest bank in Canada will confirm / deny your guess. As I understand it the new CIO got the job based on this plan to keep IT budget down. For this one friend who will be losing his contract early next yr, we can have 8-12 offshore programmers from his contract alone.
None at all. I would prefer not be vague and indirect, but if he asks (and he does now and then since I gave a print interview regarding the G20 activities around our building) I can honestly say I did not name the company.
http://kara.allthingsd.com/20101130/yahoo-layoffs-coming-dec...