http://www.wsws.org/ told a story of the closing of DHL, the delivery service, in Ohio. The thing is it just did not read like what we are seeing out of the news services with there one sentence paragraphs by the lowest paid people they can hire. The story really wanted to convey what the closing meant to one town in Ohio and it used the personal face approach.

Yesterday, I read four different stories of layoffs and plant closing in Oklahoma that came on top of the 110,000 layoffs announced in a four-day period. So, this thread is just to capture some of the numbers and maybe find some real story tellers like we see in the WSWS.org article from November titled "DHL closing to devastate Ohio town." -- http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/nov2008/dhli-n21.shtml

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http://www.wsws.org/images/n20-DHL2-480cap.jpg

Citing the deepening economic crisis in the United States, international delivery service DHL Express last week abruptly announced it would drastically reduce its US operations. The plan, to be implemented by early 2009, leaves workers and their families to struggle with joblessness and outright collapse of local economies in company-dependent communities throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and California.

According to company announcements, DHL plans to eliminate 9,500 US jobs outright as it discontinues domestic-only air and ground deliveries within the US, shutting down all ground hubs in the country as well as 309 of its 412 stations.

These layoffs come on top of the 5,400 workers cut from DHL’s US operations in May. The latest round will bring the total number of layoffs to 16,000 in the last six months.

After the cuts, the German-based company will employ less than 4,000 to handle its international shipping to and from the US.

The social and economic impact of these job losses will be particularly devastating to Wilmington, Ohio, where DHL’s largest distributing facility is located, and the 12,000 inhabitants of this small town. According to the company, an estimated 3,500 DHL workers will lose their jobs at the Wilmington facility between now and January 31. However, the number of area residents likely to lose their jobs is far higher.

Reflecting the former economic health of the town, Wilmington was listed in 1995 as one of America’s “finest small towns” in “The 100 Best Small Towns in America,” a popular guidebook by Norm Crampton. Now it is threatened with extinction.

http://www.wsws.org/images/n20-DHL-480cap.jpg

In addition to the DHL workers, employees at other air delivery companies servicing DHL at the Clinton County Air Park are among those who face immediate job cuts. Due to Federal Aviation Authority restrictions on air deliveries by internationally owned companies, DHL has relied on ABX Air and Astar Air Cargo to provide domestic air deliveries of their packages passing through their Wilmington hub.

This places in jeopardy an estimated 6,000 of the 7,000 ABX jobs at the Wilmington facility and hundreds more under Astar Air, according to the Dayton Daily News. Workers report that orders through the facility are slowing down already. “Who wants their stuff to be in there when the place closes?” asked one worker.

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http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10153917-16.html
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An inside source at Novell just informed me that Novell laid off a considerable percentage of its workforce on Friday, suggesting that "basically an across-the-board reduction of 25 percent" had been made. The news came in too late to seek comment from Novell, but I will try to get an update over the weekend.

These Novell layoffs add to the mounting woes of the already enfeebled technology industry, which has seen tens of thousands of employees lose their jobs.

Though Novell's layoffs may be the most extensive of any open-source company of which I'm aware, Novell is by no means alone: Sun has also announced an 18 percent reduction in headcount, while several of the most prominent open-source startups have more quietly laid off significant percentages of their own employees in an effort to achieve profitability more quickly than originally planned.

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Target lays off 600 in Twin Cities

Target lets go about 9 percent of its headquarters workforce, the deepest cuts in company history.



By JACKIE CROSBY and CHRIS SERRES, Star Tribune

Last update: January 28, 2009 - 6:17 PM

Even Target isn't immune from the economic woes gripping the nation. The Minneapolis-based retail giant laid off 600 employees Tuesday in the Twin Cities, adding to the list of tens of thousands of job losses at companies across the country.

Target said it also will not fill 400 open positions, making the cuts amount to about 9 percent of Target's 11,000 headquarters workers, the bulk of whom work at its Nicollet Avenue office in downtown Minneapolis. It adds up to the largest job-slashing in company history.

In addition to corporate cuts, Target will close a distribution center in Little Rock, Ark., this year, forcing another 500 people out of work.

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Part 2

Visualizing the Growth of Target

This is a video presentation from FlowingData that shows the growth of Target stores by having an expanding red dot appear for every store as it displays the years starting with 1962-- http://projects.flowingdata.com/target/

Here is the FlowingData graphic on Target store openings:
http://projects.flowingdata.com/target/images/targets_by_year.png

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/econ-j27.shtml
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By Tom Eley
27 January 2009

On Monday, employers in the US and internationally announced tens of thousands of layoffs in an indication that the economic crisis is accelerating and spreading throughout the American and world economy—and far outpacing governmental measures to respond. Among the major layoffs:

* Caterpillar Inc., the world leader in heavy construction equipment, announced 20,000 layoffs for the first quarter of 2009.

* The drugmaker Pfizer Inc. said it will lay off 8,000 workers, the first casualties of the firm's $68 billion takeover of rival pharmaceutical corporation Wyeth.

* SprintNextel, the cell phone carrier, will cut 8,000 jobs, or 14 percent of its workforce, by the end of March. It eliminated 4,000 jobs little more than a year ago.

* Home Depot Inc., the largest US home improvement retailer, said it will cut 7,000 jobs and shutter 34 of its Expo home design stores.

* General Motors, the embattled auto giant, announced 2,000 more layoffs affecting plants in Ohio and Michigan, where the unemployment rate has already climbed past 10 percent.

* Texas Instruments Inc., after announcing a precipitous decline in profits, said it would eliminate 3,400 jobs.

* Phillips Electronics, the Dutch electronics giant, said it would cut 6,000 workers from its worldwide workforce.

* Corus Group, a steelmaker, said it would eliminate 3,500 jobs, 2,500 of which will come in Britain.

* The Dutch bank ING announced the elimination of 7,000 jobs after it reported its first-ever quarterly loss.

The scale and rapidity of the layoff announcements are bringing the historic dimensions of the economic crisis into focus. John Challenger, CEO of the employment-tracking firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., commented on the day's bloodletting. "What is remarkable about today is the layoffs seem to be coming from every corner of the economy," he said. "Usually there are sectors that get hit particularly hard. This recession has been focused on housing and financial services, although automotives have come into it as well. But now we have other areas, like retail and technology, as the next wave of the recession hits."

So far in 2009, Challenger has counted 128,600 announced layoffs among only 19 major corporations. It is anticipated that US payrolls will decline by nearly 600,000 in January, which would mark the third consecutive month that the economy has lost more than one half million jobs and the fifth straight month of more than 400,000 job losses. This would be "the first such occurrence of either dating back to the beginning of 1939," Dan Greenhaus of the equity strategy group Miller Tabak & Co. told Marketwatch.

The mass layoffs suggest that job losses in 2009 may well outstrip those of 2008, when an estimated 2.6 million jobs were purged—the most since 1945—and the official unemployment rate will continue to climb from the 7.2 percent level it hit in December, which was already the highest level in 16 years.

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There is a listing of recent Forbes layoff reports at http://search.forbes.com/search/find?MT=announced%20layoffs

The Weekly Layoff Report: Jan. 30, 2009(http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/30/layoffs-employment-jobs-leadership-careers_0130_layoff_report.html)

Labor
The Weekly Layoff Report: Jan. 30, 2009
J. Isaac Spradlin, 01.30.09, 04:45 PM EST
Almost 90,000 layoffs were announced at America's largest public companies this week.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a supercop, a spy and a robot. Now he's facing a more challenging adversary than any that his characters faced. The California governor's new target is layoffs. Specifically, he's fighting with the state's public employee unions to be able to furlough employees rather than let them go completely. Unions in the private sector have warmed up to such alternatives to layoffs. The unions are putting up a fight.

Nobody appears to be winning layoff battles right now. Last week was a terrible one for American employees, with nearly 90,000 losing their jobs among the nation's 500 largest corporations.

Here are the highlights of the week's activity as recorded by the Forbes.com Layoff Tracker, which counts the layoffs at all of the nation's 500 largest corporations.

Caterpillar (nyse: CAT - news - people ) and Pfizer (nyse: PFE - news - people ) both had the week's biggest numbers. Caterpillar's quarterly profit dropped 32%, whereupon the company announced layoffs totaling 22,110 workers. The company's stock had already fallen to a 52-week low.

Pfizer signed a deal this week to acquire drug maker Wyeth (nyse: WYE - news - people ) for $68 billion. The move is widely judged a good one for Pfizer, some of whose most lucrative drug patents expire in the next few years, but it will result in five factory closings and about 19,000 layoffs.

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The LA Times is owned by the Chicago Times. This Chicago Times article is only4 paragraphs. I guess they don't have staff qualified to ask management for an interview.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sat-brf4-tribune-jan31,0,3832323.story
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—Compiled from Tribune staff, wire reports
January 31, 2009

Chicago-based Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times said it is cutting 300 positions and will shrink the daily sections to four from five.

The paper's publisher, Eddy Hartenstein, informed staff in a memo Friday, explaining the cuts "are designed to help us deal with the economic realities of the day."

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http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/02/news/companies/macys/index.htm
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Department store chain said the job action affects 4% of the company's total workforce.

By Parija B. Kavilanz, CNNMoney.com senior writer
Last Updated: February 2, 2009: 3:47 PM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Macy's Inc. said Monday that it's cutting 7,000 jobs - including 5,100 in its stores - and centralizing some of its corporate operations in an effort to reduce costs amid an increasingly difficult retail environment.

The company also projected earnings for the fiscal year just beginning that are well below analysts' estimates.

Macy's shares fell 3% in late trading.

"Reducing our workforce is an unfortunate outcome of the current economic environment, and I am frustrated that so many of our people will be unable to move forward with us as we proceed into a very exciting future for Macy's and Bloomingdale's," Macy's CEO Terry Lundgren said in a statement.

The retailer estimates the restructuring efforts will reduce previously planned expenses by about $400 million a year beginning in 2010.

Macy's (M, Fortune 500) said the job cuts include nearly 40% of executive positions in its central offices including 1,400 jobs in San Francisco, about 850 jobs positions in Atlanta and about 600 jobs in Miami.

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http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/090203/economy.html
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Layoffs spike as recession rips through US
Tuesday February 3, 4:48 pm ET
By Jeannine Aversa, AP Economics Writer
Layoffs cascade with PNC Financial, Liz Claiborne, Rockwell, others making cuts; more expected

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Layoffs are spiking as the recession rips through the country, with retailers, banks, factories and others cutting costs ever deeper this week. It's inflicting a painful toll on workers, and there's little relief in sight.

The latest round of pink slips and cost-cutting measures came Tuesday on the heels of tens of thousands of layoffs ordered by a slew of companies last week alone.

PNC Financial Services Group said it plans to cut 5,800 jobs. Airplane maker Hawker Beechcraft Corp. said 2,300 employees will lose their jobs before the end of the year and warned more layoffs may be coming. Liz Claiborne Inc., will eliminate 725 jobs, or 8 percent of its work force, one day after Macy's Inc. said it was axing 7,000 jobs, or 4 percent of its work force. King Pharmaceuticals Inc., will get rid of 520 jobs.

Military contractor and aerospace company Rockwell Collins Inc. is cutting 600 jobs and freezing salaries at last year's level for all executives and managers. UPS Inc. is freezing management pay and is suspending its matching contributions to employees' 401(k) plans. And General Motors Corp. said it will offer buyouts to all of its hourly workers.

With jobs vanishing at a breakneck pace, it's becoming increasingly difficult for the unemployed to find new jobs. And some of those who still have jobs are rapidly losing ground in other ways. Employers are freezing or cutting pay, trimming hours, suspending matching contributions to 401(k)s and doing away with health care, bonuses or perks that were offered during better economic times.

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http://www.wsaz.com/news/headlines/39094597.html
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Posted: 2:57 PM Feb 4, 2009
Last Updated: 4:49 PM Feb 4, 2009
Reporter: Mike Waterhouse


RAVENSWOOD, W.Va. (WSAZ) -- Century Aluminum announced Wednesday that it is closing its plant in Ravenswood, leaving 651 workers out of a job.

All of the layoffs are expected to be completed by February 20.

In a news release from the company, it planned to shut down the plan unless the selling price for aluminum stabilized and the company was able to reduce costs materially to reduce monthly losses.

"We deeply regret the impact of this action on our loyal employees and on the surrounding communities," said Ravenswood plant manager Jim Chapman. "The Ravenswood smelter has been an integral part of western West Virginia's economy and culture for over 50 years. This action, while unfortunate, was not taken lightly."

The Ravenswood smelter was constructed in 1957 and employs 679 people at full capacity.

Century Aluminum says the orderly curtailment of the plant's remaining three potlines will begin immediately, but says the plant will be carefully maintained to allow for the possibility of reopening, if justified by market conditions.

West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin told WSAZ.com he's asked local leaders in Ravenswood and lawmakers to meet at the state capitol Thursday.


United States Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) released the following statement from Washington, D.C.

“Century Aluminum has been a big part of so many lives. Generations of hard-working people have made the plant a true fixture in the community, and they have given it a proud history that spans more than 50 years. I am incredibly disappointed by the news of Century’s closing. I know the toll this will undoubtedly take on hundreds of employees and their families, the entire Jackson County community, and the local economy.

“I have been working extremely closely with Governor Manchin and the state, Century officials, the suppliers, and the workers and labor union over these past weeks to identify possible solutions. Everyone brought a serious and genuine commitment to the table. Sadly, the conditions of the world aluminum market don’t allow for a workable solution for Century at this point. Those conditions are impacting other aluminum-based companies, like Precision Coil in Clarksburg, as well. As we work in Congress on ways to get our economy back on a strong footing and create new jobs, I stand ready to help in any way I can as the workers and community deal with the effects of this devastating crisis at home. And I’m committed to working with the state to do everything we can to bring opportunities for productive jobs.”

Gov. Joe Manchin today released the following statement about the closure of Century Aluminum:

“I am truly saddened by today’s news. All the stakeholders involved – our Congressional delegation, local officials, the union, Century and its suppliers -- did everything humanly possible to save this plant.

“We all worked together in a gallant effort but we could not overcome the worldwide aluminum market conditions, which forced the company to make this decision.

“The company has promised to keep the plant in good condition so that if the market returns, there is the possibility of reopening. We continue our commitment to work tirelessly to bring any possible opportunities to the plant, and we will work closely with Century to make sure those opportunities can be realized.

“Our WORKFORCE WV team is prepared to help Century’s employees with training and other assistance to get them back to work as soon as possible.”

http://www.actionforex.com/latest-news/us-economy/another-522,000-private-jobs-lost-in-the-u.s.,-adp-says-2009020477542/
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Another 522,000 Private Jobs Lost in the U.S., ADP Says

US Economy | Written by CEP News | Feb 04 09 13:24 GMT |
(CEP News) - A survey of private employment in the U.S. showed another 522,000 jobs were lost in January.

The private employment survey figure suggests that forecasts for 535,000 job losses in Friday's official statistics may be a fair estimate.

Economists had been expecting a 535,000 decline in employment in the month. The previous month's print was slightly revised to -659k from a previous estimate of -693k.

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