gannett plans to layoff 3,000 by december.

Clutch,
You are making me cry right now because what you say makes sense ( the law part, not Gitmo per se) However, it won't happen because businesses will cry that the big-bad government is then treading on free trade.

 

Great. Stock droped 24 percent today. How longer until 3,000, or 30,000, more are gone.

 

I gather it's not alone, but Gannett now has more debt than its market cap.

 

We're all fucked.

 

At meeting with publisher in Detroit today, he was saying Gannett is watching the new delivery plan here closely. He said there are at least three of the biggest newspapers in the country who want to fly in here and see what we're doing and how we're doing it. They're banking a lot on this cutting back home delivery thing. And bottom line, it's a helluva lot better than shutting the place down. If it works here, Gannett probably will be looking to implement it other places.

 

Yes and no.
Might be better as journalists, but as far as carriers and pressmen and pre-press goes, no. They lose jobs, stop buying the paper and it's the same vicious cycle

 

At this point, I seriously wonder if much in this economy is still salvagable.

Maybe it would be better for the whole damn system to melt down and rebuild from scratch. Somedays, I honestly hope that happens.

 

Oh no, you really don't. Ask anyone who lived through the Great Depression what it was like. Report back.

 

Wait a minute. We get cranky when Gannett doesn't like the idea of falling shy of its profit projections and imposes furloughs or pay cuts on employees to pad the bottom line. But that bugs us mostly because it hurts our personal profit projections. So it's OK for us to get mad about falling short of revenue, but it's not OK for the company to get mad about that?

Take it a little further, and what do we do? We cut back on our spending. So that the barber or the babysitter or the grocer ends up feeling pain caused by the "furloughs" or "pay cuts" we impose on them.

We ARE Gannetts, all of us.

(Never, ever in 1,000 years did I think I'd ever be able to take a devil's advocate's role for a bunch of asswipes like Gannett but, to be honest, the situations are parallel. Up to the point of laying people off, anyway. Fuck me.)

 

Though I agree with you in principle, keep in mind that one size does not fit all. A $100M quarterly profit would be a disaster for Exxon, because it costs them a zillion bucks to turn the $10 billion quarterly profits they have rung up a few times recently.

 

I have no concerns, Joe, with your question. I respect your opinions, too.

The problem is that Gannett's employees are directly impacted by the company's poor decisions - not the other way around in this case.

I'm all for taking one for the team if I believe the cause is just. In this case, i don't believe Gannett's greed is.

Companies pay their employees every year to help make money. All i expect is to get paid what my employer said it would. While Gannett is not alone in doing so, it projected to make way too much of a profit return. It is still making money but trying to keep more chips in its corner by taking away from the worker bees.

I consider that to be a big difference.

 

You're comparing employees which make $30,000 a year to a multi-million dollar corporation? Come on, now you know that's not fair.

When Gannett falls short of their "profit goal", they still make a considerable amount of money. Just a quick google search shows that their third quarter earnings report listed them as making a combined $7.5M through advertising and publishing revenue through the first three quarters of 2008. That's still a SHITLOAD of money.

Meanwhile, the employee that got laid off or was put on one-week furlough has to shuffle bills around to make sure they keep their house or car or electricity.

It's pure and simple corporate greed. $7.5M through the first three quarters of 2008 just simply wasn't enough for the greedy bastards.

If I were making $75K a year, then, yes, I could see your point. But because I'm scraping by paycheck-to-paycheck, I have a hard time drawing that parallel between myself and a company that makes more money in a week that I'll see in my lifetime.