With all of the news of layoffs last month, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that nearly 600,000 jobs were lost in January – the largest one-month drop since 1974. However, seeing that large of a number at once is still pretty shocking. It’s estimated that with these latest figures, 3.6 million people have been laidoff since December 2007, when experts say the recession initially began.
Here at Glassdoor we’ve seen the current economy’s impact in the reviews that have posted to the site. In January, we saw the greatest number of reviews submitted with the terms “layoff” and “severance” than ever before. Check out the graphic below to see how the percentage of reviews with these terms mentioned has increased over time:
The top 5 companies where the word lay-off or severance was mentioned include Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, IBM and EDS. See what some of these employees are saying:
Sun Technical Lead in Santa Clara, CA Sun employees have endured unplanned layoffs three times a year for the past four years. In that length of time, Sun has retained approximately 45 thousand employees, had perhaps four thousand senior employees quit, and laid off about eleven thousand employees — often very quietly. This creates serious morale problems among employees who survive those layoffs. Anything positive I could say about Sun must be tempered with this layoff problem, always lurking in the background, always sapping the employee pride and enthusiasm that would normally produce the competitive edge that made Sun a successful company in the past.
IBM Advisory Engineer in Boulder, Co Executive management does not communicate truthfully about layoffs or pretty much anything dealing with employees. They have basically been lying about the current layoffs. Of course, they layoff staff but very few managers. They purport to hire only the best, but then they have no problem giving ranking based on an arbitrary distribution. Which in turn does not make employees feel very valued. Benefits have slowly been reduced over the years; waiting for that to happen again.
| Rank | Employer | Company Rating |
| 1 | Sun Microsystems | 3.1 |
| 2 | Hewlett-Packard | 2.8 |
| 3 | Motorola | 2.6 |
| 4 | IBM | 3.2 |
| 5 | EDS | 2.6 |
| 6 | Sprint Nextel | 2.9 |
| 7 | AOL | 2.8 |
| 8 | AT&T | 2.7 |
| 9 | Nortel Networks | 2.8 |
| 9 | Dell | 3.0 |
| 11 | Washington Mutual | 2.7 |
| 12 | Intel Corporation | 3.5
|
| 13 | Alcatel-Lucent | 2.7 |
| 14 | AMD | 3.0 |
The question on the minds of many of us – where do we go from here? Will Obama’s stimulus package help, or will it get much worse before it gets better? What do you think?
