I have long thought that this would be the undoing of our economy. Not the HP layoffs specifically, but the mad rush to eliminate all the expensive white collar middle class jobs. Even without the financial crisis, there has been a significant erosion of these positions through outsourcing and off shoring. These jobs are mostly in the top 10% and strike me as making up a significant amount of consumer spending as they have disposable income that the 90% for the most part does not. 

The recession is going to be much longer and deeper because of this. I suspect that eventually it will even out as the global labor market becomes more uniform. Once all the smart technical folks all live in expensive global cities the cost of intellectual labor will largely be the same around the world. It's already getting harder to staff technical positions in cheap areas. Anyone skilled enough to be worth hiring doesn't want to live there and has other options.

when I was young, HP really stood for something - quality engineering and best of class products in just about every area they were involved in. Not any more. I refuse to buy any HP or Compaq equipment any more, too many bad experiences.

RIFs are always bad for morale,  but if you've got to do it,  incentivizing early retirement is the most humane way, and least damaging to morale.

Won't the downsides in morale be offset by increased productivity by people who don't want a pink slip in this economy? 

In general, productivity goes up even faster when the labor market is tight, so I'm not sure how it would be different at HP. 

I'm not disputing the larger point that this is just slash and burn capitalism that no one associated with should be praised for being a job creator. 

Snip

Born into a low-caste Dalit family, she was bullied at school, forced into marriage at the age of 12, fought social pressures to leave her husband, before she tried to take her own life.

Today, she is a multi-millionaire.

Snip

Her reputation led to her being asked to take over the running of a metal engineering company, Kamani Tubes, which was in massive debt.

By restructuring the company, she turned things around.

"I wanted to give justice to the people who were working there. I had to save the company. I could relate to the staff who needed to put food on the table for their family," she says of her motivations at the time.

Now, Kamani Tubes is a growing business, worth more than $100m.

Kalpana employs hundreds of people, from all backgrounds and castes. She has met prominent businessmen such as Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, and in 2006 won a prestigious award for her entrepreneurial spirit.

Kalpana regularly visits her home village and does charity work to help those in her community.

As a Dalit and a woman, her story is all the more remarkable in a country where so few CEOs are from such a background.

Full BBC story here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-18186908

We don't do honor to the right people in America...so what do we expect in return?

Best Wishes, Traveller

WASHINGTON -- Speaking to the families of dead soldiers, Vice President Joe Biden on Friday delivered an emotional retelling of his own family tragedy, the death of his wife and daughter in a car crash 40 years ago, saying the experience helped him understand why people commit suicide.

Biden said the shock and pain of the deaths in 1972, shortly after he was first elected to the Senate, was a “black hole you feel in your chest, like you're being sucked back into it.”

“It was the first time in my career, my life, I realized someone could go out – and I probably shouldn't say this with the press here, but – no, but it's more important. You're more important. For the first time in my life I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” Biden said.  “Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts; because they'd been to the top of the mountain and they just knew in their heart they'd never get there again, that it was never going to be that way ever again. That's how an awful lot of you feel.”

Biden addressed a group associated with the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, a national nonprofit group that supports friends and families of service members killed in action.

Biden has previously spoken about the accident, although he rarely describes the emotional aftermath in such detail. He described how he heard the news while in Washington.

“I was down in Washington hiring my staff, and I got a phone call saying that my family had been in an accident. And just like you guys know by the tone of a phone call – you just knew, didn't you? You knew when they walked up the path. You knew when the call came. You knew. You just felt it in your bones something bad happened,” Biden said.

“And I knew. I don't know how I knew. But the call said my wife was dead, my daughter was dead, and I wasn't sure how my sons were going to make it. They were Christmas shopping, and a tractor-trailer broadsided them and in one instant killed two of them and – well.”

Biden, a practicing Roman Catholic, said he was so angry he cried out in the Capitol. “I remember being in the Rotunda, walking through to get to the plane to get home, to get to identify the – anyway. But I remember looking up and saying, ‘God!’ It was if I was talking to God myself: ‘You can't be good! How can you be good?’”

Biden said he was pulled out of his grief with the help of his mother, his sister and, eventually, his second wife, Jill Biden, whom he married five years later. “This woman literally saved my life,” he said.

“There will come a day, I promise you, and your parents as well, when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. It will happen,” he said. “My prayer for you is that day will come sooner or later. But the only thing I have more experience than you in is this: I'm telling you it will come.”

Best Wishes, Traveller

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Tim Cook is saying "no thanks" to stock dividends potentially worth $75 million.

The company said in a regulatory filing that Cook had volunteered to exempt himself from a new compensation program under which Apple employees could collect a dividend on stock grants that have not yet vested.

The unusual move comes as boards of major companies have faced heightened scrutiny for approving excessive compensation for their CEOs.

After a year that has seen Apple's reputation tested by controversy over the way its Chinese production partners treated low-paid workers, observers said Cook might have seen an opportunity to bolster the company's image as a socially responsible and progressive force.

~~~~

On the other hand, maybe this is how responsible CEO's should behave....will the Wall Street Journal report this widely? Will the MSM hold Mr. Cook up as an example to be emulated?

Fat chance....America is corrupt to the core (I note that I may be in a bad move because I saw the Avengers tonight instead of the The Dictator which had to have been better...though Scarlett remains amazing as always, and this is the first Hulk that was any good at all...{though America does have a rot in its soul})

Traveller

The length of her time as CEO. The month before she started, HP paid $10.2 billion for a British software firm that has dragged down earnings and that HP was unprepared to absorb. Maybe it's just me, but I would prefer to give a person a little more time before trotting out storylines about the evil Republican stepping on the little guy. For left-wingers, I guess that timeline is 8 months.