The 16 Biggest Mass Layoff Announcements Of The Past Year

We're expecting the March jobs report Friday, and expectations are that nonfarm payroll employment will increase by 193,000.

The unemployment rate is expected to hold steady at 7.7 percent.

While the labor market has been trudging along slowly, mass layoffs in the past year have weighed on employment.

We drew on Bloomberg data to highlight the 16 biggest layoff announcements since April of last year.

16. First Solar: 2,000

Percent of Employees Cut:
28.57 percent

Number of Employees After Cuts:
7,000

First Solar announced that it would layoff almost a third of its workforce early last year and shut down its factory in Germany. This comes as the European market for green energy has deteriorated.

Source: Business Insider, Bloomberg

15: JC Penney: 2,200

Percent of Employees Cut:
1.90 percent

Number of Employees After Cuts:
116,000

JC Penney employees were told earlier this year that they have to get ready to "work harder with less" in 2013. "Service Leaders, administrative assistants, and office/cash room associates" were being cut, though some of these were being reabsorbed and offered sales positions. 

CEO Ron Johnson has been trying to transform the retailer. 19,000 employees have been laid off since he took over.

Source: Business Insider, Bloomberg

14. Colgate-Palmolive Co: 2,316

Percent of Employees Cut:
6.00 percent

Number of Employees After Cuts:
38,600

Colgate-Palmolive, which makes a variety of consumer products like shampoo and toothpaste, announced that it would be laying off 2,316 employees by 2016. The layoffs are expected to save the company more than $365 million annually. 

Source: The Motley Fool, Bloomberg

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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The Biggest Problem In Technology

PyCon is the largest annual conference dedicated to the open-source Python programming language; it counts among its sponsors Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Normally, it is exactly as boring and unremarkable as a gathering of twenty-five hundred programming-language enthusiasts sounds. But this year, on March 17th, two employees of PlayHaven, a company that develops tools for video-game marketing, made a couple of jokes while sitting in the tenth row of a “lightning talk.” One of the jokes was about “big dongles.” It was a dick joke. (Amy Poehler has made a similar joke on national television, at Best Buy’s behest.) The other joke, according to a commenter on Hacker News, who claimed to be one of the two employees, was a remark that “I would fork that guys [sic] repo.” It was, “mr-hank” claimed, a reference to the fact that taking a developer’s code repository and “forking” the code, creating a new development based on the original, is a new form of flattery—in other words, not sexual in nature. Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for SendGrid, was sitting in front of the pair, and overheard their conversation. She could, as she later wrote on her blog, “feel [her] face getting flustered.” Then she took the above picture of the men and tweeted it to thousands of followers, with the hashtag #PyCon. She captioned it, “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles.” PyCon organizers swooped in, talked to the PlayHaven employees, and declared the situation “dealt with” on Twitter. Click here to read more > Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

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