Right On Cue, Post-Merger T-Mobile Layoffs Begin

from the round-and-round-we-go dept

US courts and regulators recently rubber stamped the T-Mobile Sprint merger, ignoring forty years of history showing how US telecom megamergers almost always result in less competition, higher prices, and fewer jobs. Eliminating one of just four US wireless carriers is likely to result in higher prices (see: Canada or Ireland). Wall Street analysts and unions alike predict the deal could eliminate anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 jobs, and data suggests the consolidation could result in employees across the sector making less money even if they work at other companies.

Like most mergers, T-Mobile and Sprint executives have spent a year telling people none of this will actually happen and critics were being hyperbolic. Executives like John Legere (whose leaving in April and thus won't have to bear witness to his own handiwork) insisted repeatedly that the competition-eroding deal would somehow increase competition and create thousands of new, high paying jobs. Real world analysis from numerous experts never supported that, and early returns on those promises aren't looking so hot.

Light Reading late last week reported that with the ink not even dry on the merger, the company was already starting to trim jobs at one of its prepaid phone divisions, Metro:

"According to three people familiar with the company, T-Mobile has laid off a number of employees within its Metro by T-Mobile prepaid business. The extent of the layoffs is unclear. The company couldn't immediately provide a response to questions from Light Reading on the topic.

T-Mobile did not respond to repeated requests from me for comment on the nature of the layoffs. Neither would the company respond to inquiries made by other outlets like Ars Technica or Fierce Wireless. That suggests to me these layoffs were indeed merger related, since T-Mobile could have simply stated that the departures were scheduled pre-merger, assuming that was true.

Peter Adderton, founder of prepaid wireless provider Boost Mobile, was backing the deal just a few months ago. His tone has now completely shifted, and he noted that a lot of these laid off employees were informed of the layoffs during an impersonal conference call:

Like most US telecom mergers, around 4% of the journalists that uncritically hyped this merger's "synergies" will go back in a few years and scrutinize the company's pre-merger promises. And all of the think tankers and analysts that rubber stamped the deal uncritically will go mute in a few years when the price hikes and additional retail and middle management layoffs arrive, pretending they had some other, mysterious origins. This is, apparently, just how we do things in America, a country that seems habitually incapable of learning much of anything from history or experience.

Filed Under: competition, jobs, layoffs, mergers
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

AT&T Said Trump Tax Cuts Would Create Thousands Of Jobs. Instead, AT&T's Laying Off Thousands.

from the head-fake dept

It seems like only yesterday that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was promising on live television that if Trump followed through on his tax cuts, the company would dramatically boost investment, in the process creating thousands of new jobs. Not "entry-level jobs," mind you, but "7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in the ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year." Each $1 billion in new investment, AT&T insisted, would result in 7,000 new jobs. "Lower taxes drives more investment, drives more hiring, drives greater wages," Stephenson said.

Yeah, about that.

Here on planet Earth, AT&T has revealed that the company's slated CAPEX for 2020 will actually be decreasing by about $3 billion next year. The company is also preparing to engage in a new round of significant job cuts as it fights off an ongoing investor revolt triggered by the company's bumbling obsession with merger mania, and a continued exodus of video subscribers caused by relentless price hikes and branding incompetence.

It's unclear how many employees will lose their jobs and/or benefits with this latest round of cuts (one of several in just the last few years), but the scale isn't expected to be subtle:

"Everything is on the table," AT&T COO John Stankey said Tuesday at the UBS Global TMT Conference in New York. "It's a target-rich environment."

AT&T's cost-reduction program initially will include a 4% cut in the operator's labor expenses -- representing roughly $1.5 billion of the operator's finances -- next year. During an investor event last week, AT&T CFO John Stephens explained that the initiative would target employees, contractors, benefits "and so forth."

That is, if you're playing along at home, the precise opposite of what Stephenson promised.

The Trump tax cut resulted in AT&T getting billions in immediate tax relief, and roughly $3 billion in tax savings annually, in perpetuity. Yet when it came time for AT&T to re-invest this money back into its network and employees as promised, the company actually did the opposite and began laying them off in droves. Unions claim AT&T has laid off an estimated 23,000 workers worldwide since the Trump tax plan, with investors and executives unsurprisingly pocketing the savings. Anything even vaguely resembling accountability for these false promises has been utterly nonexistent.

The dip in overall CAPEX is also the exact opposite of what AT&T claimed when it lobbied for the elimination of net neutrality. You'll recall AT&T executives and lobbyists repeatedly claimed that the FCC's net neutrality rules stifled sector investment, a claim indisputably disproven by an endless number of studies and reports. Even telecom CEOs themselves are on record clearly stating this investment apocalypse never actually occurred. Granted, it's worth noting AT&T has received countless billions in other regulatory favors thanks to a rubber stamp FCC; efforts just as unlikely to result in new jobs or network investment.

Again, nobody anywhere has actually held AT&T accountable for these falsehoods. Nor is there any indication, on absolutely any front, that anybody intends to. And in the post-truth era, the folks who supported throwing billions at AT&T for doing nothing still somehow suggest the decision worked wonders, despite a convoy of evidence and data making it abundantly clear that's not true. All told, you can be fairly sure we'll learn absolutely nothing from this experience, and before long AT&T will line up, hand outstretched, quite accurately expecting Uncle Sam to repeat the process all over again.

After all, the company has been engaged in some variation of the same tap dance for the better part of the last few decades with only fleeting efforts to do anything about it.

Filed Under: donald trump, jobs, layoffs, randall stephenson, tax cuts
Companies: at&t

AT&T Lays Off Thousands After Nabbing Billions In Tax Breaks And Regulatory Favors

from the ill-communication dept

Back in November of 2017 AT&T promised that if it received a tax break from the Trump administration, it would invest an additional $1 billion back into its network and employees. At the time, CEO Randall Stephenson proclaimed that "every billion dollars AT&T invests is 7,000 hard-hat jobs." Not "entry-level jobs," AT&T promised, but "7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year."

Yeah, about that.

The Trump tax cut resulted in AT&T getting billions in immediate tax relief, and roughly $3 billion in tax savings annually, in perpetuity. Yet when it came time for AT&T to re-invest this money back into its network and employees, AT&T actually did the opposite and began laying them off in droves. Unions claim AT&T has laid off an estimated 23,000 workers worldwide since the Trump tax plan, with investors and executives unsurprisingly pocketing the savings. This week, the word came down that AT&T would be laying off thousands more as it wraps up fiber deployment:

"Leaked internal documents confirmed most of the 1,800 planned job cuts. One AT&T surplus declaration shows that more than 900 of the surplus jobs come from the company's Southeast division in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. This document attributes most of the cuts to "economic" reasons and some to "technological/operational efficiency."

While AT&T had been deploying fiber as per a 2015 DirecTV merger condition (something the Trump FCC tried to credit to killing net neutrality), the company recently finished up those obligations, and now has returned to the default state of most US telcos: skimping on fiber upgrade investment thanks to limited competition. There's been nary a peep from Trump INC, because fattening investor and executive wallets, unless you're new here or exceedingly gullible, was the entire point. Objective experts say the cuts uniformly failed to deliver any of the numerous investment and employment promises made by Trump INC.

Of course this is a shtick AT&T has been engaging in for decades now under both political parties. AT&T will promise a universe of jobs and network investment if it gets "X" (X=killing net neutrality, a tax break, eliminating consumer protections, approving a new merger, passing a law AT&T wrote), but then bails on following through. Nobody in the government much cares because AT&T's among the wealthiest and most politically powerful companies in the world and turning a blind eye is politically helpful. Nobody in the press much cares because covering failed AT&T promises on the tech policy front doesn't get hits, and most journalists are too young to remember the last forty times we've gone through this.

While the press likes to suggest that the Trump administration is "at odds" with AT&T because his DOJ sued to block AT&T's attempted merger with Time Warner, that had more to do with pleasing Rupert Murdoch and angering CNN than any real disdain for AT&T. AT&T's largely been a loyal ally to the Trump administration ever since one of its lobbyists paid Michael Cohen $600,000 for additional access to the President, and if you step back and really try to calculate the billions AT&T has gleaned from Trump and Ajit Pai's apathetic tenures so far, you'll quickly get a nasty headache.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fiber, infrastructure, investment, layoffs, tax breaks
Companies: at&t

AT&T's Planning Yet More Layoffs Despite Tens Of Billions In Tax Breaks And Government Favors

from the Charlie-Brown-and-Lucy-football dept

Telecom monopolies have a pretty good racket going. They'll consistently demand all manner of tax cuts, subsidies, and other government perks in exchange for A: jobs that never actually materialize, or B: broadband network expansions that somehow never actually arrive. The nation's telcos in particular have received countless billions in taxpayer subsidies to expand their broadband networks, yet time and time again we've shown how they've wiggled out of these obligations, leaving huge swaths of America left outside of the reach of fast, inexpensive, competitive broadband (that's particularly true in poor urban and rural areas).

Yet somehow, we here in America never quite learn the lesson. Case in point: you might recall that in late 2017 AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told anybody who'd listen that the Trump era tax cuts (which granted AT&T a $20 billion one-time windfall and $3 billion in extra cash every year thereafter) would create upwards of 7,000 new high-paying jobs paying $70-$80k. The CEO also tried to claim that as a direct result of the tax cuts it would be doling out $1000 bonuses to roughly 200,000 employees.

Funny story, but those promised jobs never arrived. AT&T did technically add some jobs, but they were of the dirt cheap, off-shored labor variety. In reality, union data suggests the company cut 10,700 US jobs in the year since Stephenson made his statement. This was on the heels of the 44 call centers and 16,000 jobs AT&T had already cut since 2011. And those bonuses? While employees did receive them, it was later revealed they had already been arranged as part of union negotiations, and had nothing to do with the Trump tax cuts. Even then, they accounted for about 7% of just one year of AT&T's new tax benefits.

Fast forward to this week, when insiders at AT&T informed me that the company is planning yet another round of significant layoffs at the company as it attempts to pivot from grumpy old telco to sexy new Millennial advertising company:

"A source at AT&T who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly told Motherboard that company leadership is planning what it’s calling a “geographic rationalization” and employment “surplus” reduction that will consolidate some aspects of AT&T operations in 10 major operational hubs in New York, California, Texas, New Jersey, Washington State, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, and Washington, DC. A spokesperson for AT&T confirmed to Motherboard that it is planning to “adjust” its workforce."

AT&T downplayed the scope of the layoffs in my conversations with the company, but employees tell me they believe that as AT&T consolidates its network workforce in these key cities, a significant number of employees will lose their jobs if they're outside of this footprint and unwilling or unable to relocate. While AT&T informed me the layoffs would only impact a "very small" number of employees, we should be able to fact check that claim in a few weeks or months when the cuts are made official.

On one hand, you can understand that a company flush with antiquated copper landlines might need to streamline its roster as it refocuses on streaming video over wireless. On the other hand, this is not the future AT&T promised in the wake of not only receiving tens-of-millions in tax breaks, but the incalculable billions it stands to make courtesy of the attack on net neutrality and FCC authority. The moves closely mirror similar ones made by Verizon, which responded to the huge cash influx not with hiring or raises, but with a massive, 10,000 employee workforce reduction.

About five years ago even the Wall Street Journal was forced to concede that throwing tax cuts at giant telecom monopolies never actually nets the job and investment promises the companies and their well-lobbied lawmaker pals claim they will. Everybody knows these kinds of perks go right into executive and investor pockets, yet every few years we engage in this adorable little stage play where we pretend these kinds of telecom subsidies, tax breaks, and deregulatory favors actually aid the common good, despite the fact history repeatedly shows us that's never been, nor will ever be, actually true.

Filed Under: favors, jobs, layoffs, tax breaks
Companies: at&t

ESPN On-Air Talent About To Care About The Cord-Cutters The Execs Aren't Concerned About

from the disconnect-over-the-disconnecters dept

It's been more than a bit perplexing to watch ESPN, sports television giant though it may be, shrug its shoulders at the cord-cutting trend that has refused to bend to the network's pleasure. With streaming being a thing, and that super-charging the cord-cutting revolution, we've made the point for some time that the sports broadcast industry was eventually going to feel the grip of fewer subscribers, as has been the case with much of the rest of the television medium. Yet ESPN barely reacted at all to cord-cutting, other than to insist that established ratings systems are crap and that its loss of millions of subscribers over the past few years was of no concern, mostly because those subscribers were poor. ESPN President John Skipper said just last year:

People trading down to lighter cable packages. That impact hasn't leaked into ad revenue, nor has it leaked into ratings. The people who’ve traded down have tended to not be sports fans, and have tended to be older and less affluent. We still see people coming into pay TV. It remains the widest spread household service in the country after heat and electricity.

Yet those comments came almost immediately after a huge round of layoffs at the network in 2015, trimming the behind-the-camera staff to what is essentially a skeleton crew. Still, stock prices stalled for Disney, with much of the blame being placed upon ESPN's subscriber loss. Some market experts have made some rather bold predictions that the subscriber woe for ESPN is over-hyped, even going so far as to predict massive market gains for Disney this year. That optimism seems to be largely built on the recent investment ESPN has made into digital distribution and streaming options. But if anyone out there is buying such optimism, the executives at ESPN do not seem to be among them.

Richard Deitsch at Sports Illustrated has a detailed write-up of ESPN's plans for its on-air talent in 2017 and it certainly looks like that talent is going to have reason for concern about cord-cutting that the executives lack.

SI has learned that ESPN will have significant cost-cutting over the next four months on its talent side (people in front of the camera or audio/digital screen). Multiple sources said ESPN has been tasked with paring tens of millions of staff salary from its payroll, including staffers many viewers and readers will recognize. Those with contracts coming up would be particularly vulnerable, sources said. The company is also expected to buyout some existing contracts, which is something rare for ESPN historically beyond a few NFL talents. The cuts are expected to be completed by June. Sources within ESPN say that there is no set list of names yet and stressed that behind-the-scenes people will likely (key word) not be impacted by these cuts.

Last month Reuters reported Disney had a lower-than-expected quarterly revenue, hurt by the drop in advertising revenue at ESPN. In addition, ESPN continues to shed subscribers at an enhanced rate, down to 88.4 million households in Dec. 2016. That number was 100.002 million in Feb. 2011.

It had to happen eventually. A network can't drop subscribers at rates in the double-digits without eventually taking a hit on the ad-revenue. Couple that with the sports licensing landscape in which partnering with teams and leagues has never been more expensive and it becomes difficult to see a way out this wilderness for ESPN. And, if this seems like a terrible trend for a business generally, it's particularly bad for a brand like ESPN, whose on-air talent has always been a key part of its success. The network likes to argue that it makes the talent popular and not the other way around, and it has some recent examples that demonstrate this to some degree, but the truth is that the talent and the network are more symbiotic than that. There's a reason why the retirement of Chris Berman, annoying slogan peddler though he may be, is such a big deal. He's been a titan for the network. Replacing that while cutting pay for the on-air talent is a unenviable task, to say the least.

And, just to be clear, this is mostly to do with cord-cutting and the numbers we're talking about are enormous.

The most immediate causes of the layoffs are clear. Over the last several years rights fees have skyrocketed, with ESPN now paying over $3.3 billion annually just to broadcast the NFL and NBA. Simultaneously, ESPN’s subscriber count and viewership—the fabled dual revenue stream that has made it the most envied television company in the country—have tumbled. While the loss of 12 million subscribers over five years is mostly due to generalized cord cutting, and not subscribers specifically dropping ESPN, it doesn’t really matter: It still amounts to losing almost a billion dollars annually. The status quo is unsustainable, and with rights fees already locked in for several years, salaries are one of the biggest areas available to cut expenses.

This how media giants die. Not quickly, or with mercy, but rather by being slowly bled to death by the reality of new times and un-adopted innovation. Sources from inside the company suggest ESPN execs weren't even discussing the cord-cutting trend until 2015. It seems that may prove to have been too late to right the ship in Bristol.

Filed Under: cord cutting, espn, layoffs
Companies: disney, espn

Trump Takes Undeserved Credit For Softbank Investment & Job Promises, As Company Sells Him On A T-Mobile Sprint Merger

from the Sad! dept

In 2014 Sprint owner Softbank gave up on its planned merger with T-Mobile after regulators at the DOJ and FCC made it clear they planned to block the deal. And, just like the blocking of AT&T's attempted T-Mobile merger, this wound up being a good thing, as it protected what passes for competition in the wireless space, driving T-Mobile to compete even more intensely. That said, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son hasn't given up on a Sprint T-Mobile merger, back in August making it abundantly clear he'd be trying again should the FCC see a shift in leadership:

"There’s a key figure who will determine if Son makes another run at T-Mobile: the yet-to-be named new head of the FCC. If Son feels that person is more amenable to a combination to take on market leaders AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., he will probably try again, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter is private."

Fast forward to this week, and Son appears to have found a ray of hope named Donald Trump.

Trump and Son met this week at Trump Tower in Manhattan, shortly afterwards announcing a "new plan" to bring $50 billion in investment and 50,000 new jobs to the United States. Trump was quick to proclaim on Twitter that this investment and job growth was solely thanks to his existence:So, about that.

Most news outlets were quick to unskeptically repeat the idea that this investment was somehow a Trump master stroke, despite no actual details being released after the meeting. But a few outlets pointed out that this "new $50 billion investment" appears to be something the company actually announced in October as part of a pre-existing, four-year global investment strategy into a variety of startups and other projects. Previous reports on the fund note that while some of this money could come to the States, Softbank's $35 billion investment into the fund isn't even U.S. specific.

In short, the $50 billion investment and the 50,000 jobs are largely fairy tale numbers wholly unrelated to Donald Trump doing much of anything. It's also worth noting that when asked, Son himself wasn't actually willing to specifically credit Trump with any of it:

"...The contours of the deal Trump announced Tuesday appear in line with the company’s previous investment plans. In October, SoftBank announced it would create a $100 billion fund – with the backing of Saudi Arabia – in a bid to become the “biggest investor in the technology sector,” Son said at the time.

Son on Tuesday did not say whether the new investment pledge was a result of Trump's victory, but he did say he was celebrating Trump's White House win.

"I just came to celebrate his new job,” Son said. “I said, ‘This is great, the U.S. will become great again.’"

So in short, Softbank's investment pledges have absolutely nothing to do with Trump, and were announced before Trump even won the election. Not that you'd know that by reading 90% of the news coverage about the plan. Meanwhile, where these 50,000 jobs will be coming from -- and whether they'll actually materialize at all -- is anybody's guess. The job growth certainly isn't happening at Sprint, where the company under Softbank ownership has been consistently laying off thousands of employees as it tries to trim $2.5 billion in operation expenses annually after years of continued missteps.

It's relatively clear Masayoshi Son is pining for an FCC that will let the company finally fuse Sprint with T-Mobile. And there's every indication he'll be getting his wish from the new FCC. Trump's telecom advisors are a who's who of industry-tied think tankers and lobbyists, all of whom have publicly stated the FCC should be hamstrung and defunded. One of them doesn't even believe telecom monopolies are real. Their selection for FCC boss, whoever it is, is extremely unlikely to support using regulatory authority to block mega-mergers, regardless of Trump's campaign promises to stop such deals.

While massive job creation promises are routinely bandied about in the run up to telecom mega-mergers, those promises never actually materialize. In fact the opposite happens as redundant positions are eliminated and customer support and service corners are cut to accommodate the debt taken on from the deals. Meanwhile, eliminating a major player in the wireless space results in consistently worse service and higher prices. This is, despite ample historical precedent, a lesson we're culturally unwilling to intellectually digest. Rinse, wash, repeat.

That said, this little public relations fracas was still a win for Trump and Masayoshi Son. Trump gets to falsely take credit for a several-month-old plan he had nothing to do with, and Son gets to fill Trump's head with the idea that if he supports his looming merger -- money, jobs and miracles will rain from the sky.

Filed Under: donald trump, investment, jobs, layoffs, masayoshi son, mergers, telcos
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

Patent Troll Intellectual Ventures Claims Its Layoffs Are Because It's Invented A New Way To Buy Patents

from the a-patent-in-spinning-the-press dept

Times are tough for a patent troll, apparently. A year ago, we noted that Intellectual Ventures -- the world's largest patent troll, who brought in billions of dollars by getting companies to pay up a shakedown fee to avoid lawsuits over its giant portfolio of patents (mostly cast off from universities who couldn't find any other buyers) -- was running out of cash. While IV did convince Microsoft and Sony to dump in some more cash, IV's litigation strategy is in shambles. Various lawsuits are dropping like flies without any of the big wins that IV promised.

Meanwhile, while its heavy lobbying may have helped to kill the latest attempts at patent reform, the Supreme Court's big ruling about software patents in Alice v. CLS Bank suggests that many of IV's patents just became worthless.

So it's little surprise at all that the company has just announced that it's laying off 20% of its staff -- likely about 140 employees. But, of course, IV's only real skill has been spinning the tech press into believing whatever bullshit story it's come up with to justify its innovation taxing operations. And thus, with these layoffs, it's right back into spin mode, presenting the most spectacularly ridiculous justification for the layoffs.

Does IV point to its litigation losses? Nope. Does it mention the Alice ruling? Hell no. How about the fact that many of its early backers have now turned into vicious opponents? Not at all. The fact that its in-house inventions have yet to lead to a single viable product on the market? Nope. The reason given? Apparently IV would like you to believe that it needed all those people to invent a new way to buy "ideas" in bulk and now that that's done, they're no longer needed. I'm honestly curious if IV's co-founder Edward Jung said the following out loud without laughing, or if it was just delivered to Bloomberg reporter Ashlee Vance in written form to avoid the risk of guffawing at the pure ridiculousness of it all:

Edward Jung, IV’s co-founder and chief technology officer, insists that the business is doing fine. It’s true, he says, that not as many companies bought into the patent funds as IV expected, but he says the company is happy with its returns.

The layoffs, according to Jung, represent part of the company’s evolution. IV was the first company to try to amass so many patents, and it had to hire hundreds of people to invent the processes for buying ideas in bulk. People were needed to sort through patents, acquire them covertly, think up complementary ideas, and deal with the associated paperwork. “We have more data than anybody and have analyzed it over the years,” Jung says. “Our analysis has allowed us to save a lot of needless paperwork and become more efficient. We don’t need as many people to sift through and sort information now.” Much of the work has been simplified and automated.

Nice story, but... it's rewriting history. As we've noted, IV just bought up giant patent portfolios in bulk from universities who had rushed to set up tech transfer offices in the wake of the Bayh-Dole Act in the 80s, expecting to get rich from "commercializing" all of the "inventions" that their faculty produced. The reality was that the vast majority of tech transfer offices lost money because none of the patents were worth anything by themselves, and no one wanted to buy them. IV stepped in at the perfect time, allowing tech transfer offices to save themselves the embarrassment of failing to make any money (and actually costing universities tons of money) by selling a boatload of useless patents in bulk, just so IV could run around claiming it held tens of thousands of patents, and demanding big tech companies pay up so that IV didn't have to sift through all those patents to find something (anything!) to sue over.

Filed Under: buying ideas, inventions, layoffs, patent troll
Companies: intellectual ventures

If You're Laying Off Your Social Media Expert, You Might Want To Get Those Account Passwords FIRST

from the because-the-situation-hadn't-hit-MAXIMUM-UNCOMFORTIBILITY dept

It's one of those mistakes you only make once. Unfortunately for British entertainment retailer HMV and consulting firm Deloitte, due to the circumstances under which the mistake occurred, once is all they got and once was all it took.

HMV was in the midst of a 190-person layoff (with assistance from Deloitte) when it discovered the company's official Twitter account was still in the hands of a layoffee.

Yesterday HMV, the beleaguered British entertainment retailer, laid off 190 employees, in an effort to cut costs and right its balance sheet. The company apparently pulled a large group into human resources and gave them the bad news. While this was going on, one employee, Poppy Rose, who had been an HMV community manager and thus had access to the corporate Twitter account, started live tweeting about the layoffs.

Over a period of around 20 minutes, she sent out a series of notes expressing her rising sense of alarm to HMV’s 61,500 followers (that number has since risen to 73,350).

Just before the plug was pulled, Poppy Rose gave a shout-out to its HMV's still-employed marketing director, who had noticed altogether too late that someone was live-Tweeting the layoffs. The question, "How do I shut down Twitter?" appears to have been answered by Chinese hackers (or maybe non-Chinese hackers -- hedging!), who made off with info from 250,000 accounts in the midst of some rolling blackouts.

A better question would have been: "Before we start laying people off, maybe someone should see who is running our social media accounts and whether or not they appear on the Employee Load Balancing Sheet." Employees often take to the modern day airwaves of Twitter, Facebook and presumably even Google+ to vent after layoffs, firings, disciplinary actions and random shitty days. Why anyone thought this mass layoff would be different is beyond me.

Most likely, the thought never occurred to anyone on the "culling" side of the equation until the Twitter feed began lighting up with disparaging comments about the current goings-on. HMV, in particular, was primed for this sort of embarrassment, seeing as it obviously felt a social media presence was important (hence the Twitter account), but not important enough to hand out to anyone higher than "intern" on the organizational chart. This is something more employers should be aware of, especially considering company Facebook and Twitter accounts are "standard equipment" in this day and age.

Poppy Rose, whose firing-related tweets added another 12,000 followers to HMV's Twitter account, clearly knows how to use social media. And although the tweets she fired off were far from complimentary, they clearly could have been much, much worse. Despite holding the company's online reputation in her newly-jobless hands, she showed restraint while simultaneously demonstrating how effective these tools can be.

“I wanted to show the power of Social Media to those who refused to be educated,” she tweeted. “Just to set something straight, I did not ‘hijack’ the hmv twitter account. I actually assumed sole responsibility of Twitter & Facebook over two years ago, as an intern. When asked (this afternoon), I gladly provided the password to head office. I also set another member of staff up as a manager on Facebook, and removed myself from the admin list. I didn’t resist any requests to cooperate.”

I'm sure many companies have viewed this story with interest, crossing themselves and saying, "There but for the grace of God go I and several dozen of my former employees, with signed NDAs and less-than-adequate severance packages." As ugly as a mass layoff is, failing to do a bit of due diligence in terms of your social media accounts leaves the door open for something much uglier. Sure, your former employees may take to the internet to vent about their treatment at your hands, but at least it won't look like it's coming out of your mouth.

Filed Under: layoffs, social media
Companies: hmv

Recession Reporter Laid Off... Denied Chance To Publish Final Piece About Getting Laid Off

from the in-denial dept

Via Romenesko comes the news that the Chicago Tribune's own "recession reporter" wasn't just laid off in the latest round, but was then stopped from posting a story about the experience. Well, he actually published it and it was quickly taken down by Trib editors. Of course, because of the takedown, the text of his blog post is now getting a lot more attention. Reading it over, it's difficult to see what the Trib was concerned about. It seems like the type of writing they would want in their publication -- humanizing the situation, while still being respectful of what's happening.

Filed Under: layoffs, recession, recession reporter
Companies: chicago tribune

MPAA Matches RIAA In Massive Layoffs

from the couldn't-happen-to-a-nicer-bunch dept

I missed this one when it initially happened, but it looks like the MPAA is following in the footsteps of the RIAA -- who recently laid off a bunch of folks. Apparently the MPAA quickly followed suit and drastically scaled back after the studios cut the MPAA's funding by about 15 to 20%. Apparently some of the entertainment companies are finally realizing that the strategies employed by the RIAA and MPAA (lobbying for favorable laws and suing the crap out of anyone who dares to innovate) aren't actually helping them build a stronger business. Of course, it seems likely that they'll keep making the wrong moves, even at a reduced budget -- but maybe, just maybe, they'll finally start to realize that their recent strategy has been a colossal failure.

Filed Under: layoffs, mpaa, strategy
Companies: mpaa