Yesterday, several of America's largest and most well-know companies cut people at an alarming rate. The liquidation of Circuit City could put a total of 30,000 employees onto the street. Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) cut 2,400 sales people. AMD (NYSE: AMD) cut more than 1,000 people. Hertz (NYSE: HTZ) said it will let 4,000 people go, and Wellpoint (NYSE: WLP) will fire more than 1,000 people.
Bloomberg reported that GE (NYSE: GE) might fire up to 11,000 people in its financial unit.
So, in one day, as many as 60,000 people were out of work. A look at the activity shows why it will be so hard to arrest the drop in jobs. The companies involved in downsizing yesterday range from big pharma to transportation to tech to retail. The 24 hours were, in essence, a cross-section of the entire American economy suffering under the weight of the recession.
Economists say there cannot be a recovery with a reversal of the fall in unemployment. Unfortunately, addressing the cause of joblessness is has moved well beyond saving the retail industry and Detroit. Industry by industry, the entire system has become diseased.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-17-2009 @ 1:52PM
poog11 said...
Spending on road construction, and other infrastructure seems to me, as a non-economist, fundamentally flawed. During the New Deal, there wasn't any infrastructure, so rural electrification, road construction and the like made sense-- it stimulated commerce. Now there is an infrastructure, and fixing potholes on bridges etc isn't going to have the same effect, because a bridge is still a bridge and you can just drive around the pothole. I suppose the case can be made that some new infrastructure-- fiberoptic cables, alternative energy--will help, but what happens after the roads are made a little better? As soon as the contract expires, we're back to square one, or worse-- a slightly better road, and everyone is poorer than ever. Tell me why this is wrong--