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DOMESTIC OUTSOURCING. A NON-STORY. I wrote last week about the Circuit City firings on Eschaton. If you did not read it earlier, here is a short summary:
The electronics retailer, facing larger competitors and falling sales, said Wednesday that it would lay off about 3,400 store workers. The laid-off workers, about 8 percent of the company's total work force, would get a severance package and a chance to reapply for their former jobs, at lower pay, after a 10-week delay, the company said.Such a neat trick it is. How useful this will be for all firms who are suffering under large payrolls for their more experienced workers! And note how doing this gets the firm protected from age discrimination suits. No, you were not fired because you are a doddering fifty-year old granny or grandpa. You were fired because the firm is in trouble. And no, you can't sue us. But you can come back and work for us at the rate we pay for recent school-leavers.
David Carr writes about the firings in today's New York Times. He notes that such news has been non-news, for the most part, because the labor beat is almost extinct at newspapers. From Carr's piece:
Even now, the corner office is where reporters usually go when it's time to cover business. According to Christopher R. Martin, an associate professor of journalism at Miami University, of the top 25 newspapers in the country, only four have reporters assigned to the labor beat.It is not just the print media which ignore labor news that doesn't shoehorn in the requisite managerial angle. Even public radio gives us a daily program on the stock market and the difficult lives of the managerial classes. But news on workers, from the workers' point of view? Where do you go for those?"Newspapers have shifted from going after mass audiences to targeting upscale audiences. This is a great story," Mr. Martin said, referring to the Circuit City layoffs, "but it's about working people. There have been dual wage systems before, but here you have something completely different -- the wholesale firing of people who did their jobs well."
--J. Goodrich
