• Education
• Energy
• Environment
• Health Care
• Security

In this article on MSN careers, they also suggest that you not just look at the industry-specific skills in your job search.  Folks in health care will also need additional IT staff, accountants, and administrators as they hire and grow. 

This is illustrated with the latest news on Microsoft making an offer to acquire Yahoo!.  Henry Blodget reports on the severance packages being offered to Yahoo executives in case of a "change in control".

• two years of full pay and benefits following departure,
• $3,000-$15,000 of "outplacement services" (help finding a new job),
• accelerated stock and option vesting

Nice package if (when) you can get it.  Not something that Microsoft would support as the new boss.

Microsoft's Kevin Johnson is quoted:

"Now, certainly, in combination with that, there are operational efficiencies that we will gain from this combination. And on the people front, much of the operational efficiencies certainly relate to the integration work where we've got to do a great job of getting the right people in the right jobs and making sure that we have the right amount of head count and resources, focused in the right areas."

What does that mean for you?

For Yahoos, recognize that the deal only makes sense for the acquisition if Microsoft can retain Yahoo's people, especially the engineering talent.  The Windows Live, Office Live, and MSN platforms are based on an entirely different technology stack than their Yahoo equivalents--meaning that Microsoft has little internal expertise on your platform and services.  Microsoft's press release said that

"Microsoft intends to offer significant retention packages to Yahoo! engineers, key leaders and employees across all disciplines." 

This is an opportunity to negotiate a retention package--where it is a seller's (employee's) market.  The book Fallback Position illustrates how to take advantage of such an opportunity, including ideas for sample agreement.

For Microsofties, you need to be concerned where Microsoft and Yahoo's offerings directly compete, potentially with very different strategies.  (Yahoo's Panama vs. MSN Ad Center, Yahoo! Go vs. Windows Mobile, Yahoo Mail vs. Hotmail are all examples.)  Options for combined management will be to:

• pick a platform/technology, migrate customers to the new platform and disband the old.  (An example is when Yahoo moved people to flickr after its acquisition and disbanded its own photo service.)  If Microsofties are on the losing side of the technology battle, you work has a limited timeframe through the migration and shutdown.
• continue to run both platforms, but fund future investment only in one.  The other goes into maintenance mode (with appropriate reduction in people).
• building a new integrated platform for version n+1.  This is the most expensive option because you are needing to do all three (maintain existing platforms, migrate current users from both platforms to new, and building the new platform.)  This will only happen in key, strategic properties.

Depending on which category you fall into, you may need to look at Fallback Position with tips on what to do now to be prepared for being laid off.

For both, you will need to talk to your manager, highlight your abilities (especially if you have technical expertise that crosses the road to the other camp), and talk about your willingness to relocate to Redmond or Silicon Valley.  Remember, negotiate with your friends while you can.

"A huge amount of people are blindsided by job loss around the end of the year," Shapiro says. In fact, you're around 50 percent more likely to lose your job in the fourth quarter than at any other time of year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The holidays are a smart time to lay people off, because doing so helps companies cut costs and clean up the books before the new year.

To determine if your company is in trouble, look for these signs:

• Bonuses go down or go away.
• The holiday party is downsized or done in.
• Leases on office equipment are allowed to expire or the company starts penny-pinching on office supplies.
• There is a hiring or wage freeze.

If you have any of these trouble signs, you need to prepare a contingency plan:  your Fallback Position.

The interesting thing about the nation�??s economy is that we can have a Recession in one part of the country and a Boom in another.  Currently Michigan has had a Recession for a few years and Texas is in Boom.  In that sense the national economy is an abstraction that doesn�??t really measure what�??s happening to you.

Take the example of the Whirlpool Corporation.  In the spring of 2006 Whirlpool bought Maytag, based in Newton, Iowa.  Whirlpool has two manufacturing plants, one in Clyde, Ohio and one in Monterrey, Mexico.  Clyde employs 3,700 non-union workers and Newton employed a huge union workforce of the town�??s 16,000 people:  1,200 white collar workers and 900 blue-collar, but down from a high of 2,500 employees in 2003.  They were paid a fair wage and provided health insurance for $50 a month.

Whirlpool decided in December to close the Newton plant and shift 1,000 jobs to Clyde and manufacture their products from two plants rather than three.  Jeff M. Fettig, Whirlpool�??s chairman, said that �??leaving Newton was a �??no-brainer.�??  Staying was not economically viable.  It was two companies doing the same thing that you needed one company doing very well.�??

The company will add 1,000 employees in Clyde with lower wages and fewer benefits.  A �??no-brainer�?? indeed.

The employees at Maytag also lost their pensions in the buyout.

And the company was equally generous in its severance:  $850 for each year worked up to 30 years and continued health insurance for five or six months.

The Governor tried to keep the plant, the NY Times reported, promising to build them the most �??energy efficient plant in the world.�??  The City offered to send children who went thru the public schools to college on scholarship.

Have you been laid off?  NO?  You will be!

With jerks like that in the front office.  It�??s a good thing it was a no-brainer:  if it had required a brain, the company was left wanting.

He also wants to cut deductions to companies who move jobs overseas and give breaks as credits to those companies that work to maintain jobs.

He made the statements while visiting Maytag plants, which have cut 3,000 jobs and moved them overseas the past three years.

See the full story here: http://insurancenewsnet.com/article.asp?n=1&neID=20070618290.2_ac3e00066ffff339

At the same time the City of Bay City, Michigan is probably going to lay off police and fire employees to the tune of $500,000 each to solve its economy and budget woes. 

And you thought those jobs were safe.

The City of Bayonne, NJ also announced the likely layoffs of 50 employees due to budget cuts.

And in Harrisonville, WV, Walker Industries announced it would layoff 50 employees.

It doesn�??t matter if you�??re high tech, low tech, public, or private, you are at risk of losing your job, and you had better be prepared.

I get Google Alerts any time a layoff or a job creation is announced in the news.  About 10 a day come in automatically.

See www.FallbackPositionBook.com/budget.htm

Technorati tags: Deficit, National Debt, Personal Debt

From the Waterloo, Ontario, Canada newpaper today...

The latest local job-cut news came last week with the NCR Corp. announcing plans to slash 450 jobs from its Waterloo manufacturing facility.

Some of the reasons given were the strong Canadian dollar and evolving market conditions.

What it should have read was that this employer, who has been in the community since the early 1970s, decided to move most of its high-paying manufacturing jobs to low-cost contractors.

It seems NCR's profit margin wasn't big enough, and it now wants to shift some of its operations to countries like India where they can make the same product at lower costs.

NCR's move is just the latest example of outsourcing we've seen in the Canadian economy, with Ontario alone losing more than 130,000 manufacturing jobs since the economy peaked in 2002.

Those high-paying jobs are being replaced with more contract and part-time work, making it more difficult for working families to get by.

Waterloo is losing a lot with this latest round of job cuts.

The NCR employees were famous for their charity, and their annual Christmas shopping spree in support of the Food Bank of Waterloo Region has been a highlight of the holiday season.

The concern now is that these job losses, coupled with other closings, such as the 2005 shut-down of the local La-Z-Boy plant, will mean more of those workers will be using the social services they once supported.

And what's the political response been? Little or nothing from the province, and even less from the federal level.

Some people blame the job loss on the workers' productivity.

Instead, they should blame the companies that now say that making a profit is not enough.

Some think that the number of people applying for unemployment payments is used to calculate unemployment and that’s not true.  It is another measure of the strength of the economy, relating to how many people have recently lost jobs.  For example, in Nov 18, 2006, rose by 12,000 to 321,000.  Argus Research Corp reported in a KC Star article by Jeannine Aversa of the AP that the problem comes from the “struggling auto industry…. .that has slashed jobs, companies in the homebuilding industry and furniture making and real estate all have let workers go.”  Retailers also, even at this season.

As we’ve seen in the election cycle silly season a lot of claims were made by candidates and the administration in support of candidates.  Some is interpretation but a great deal of that is pure “spin.”  Make the reality look better than it is.

As of the end of the 3^rd Quarter in 2006, let’s look at the numbers for the Unemployed:

There are 120 million full-time workers and 24.6 part-time workers.  For purposes of calculating unemployment, as strange as it seems, each is equal to the other.  One employed part-time worker counts as employed, just as the full-time worker does.  That creates a workforce of 144.6 million people.  4.6% of the full-time workers are Unemployed and 5.3% of the part-time workers.  Yet the federal government administration says that “the Unemployment rate fell to 4.4% last month, the lowest in five years.” 

Go inside those numbers a bit:  Of the Unemployed, 5.7 million are seeking full-time work and 1.4 million are seeking part-time work.  That adds to 7.2 million Unemployed, and with a workforce of 144.6 million, that’s a 4.9% Unemployment rate.  Go to this BLS site to see these numbers:  ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.cpseed4.txt

Also you can see that those aged 16-19 seeking full-time work have an Unemployment rate of 24% and those in that age cadre seeking part-time work have an Unemployment rate of 12%.  For anyone who is out of work and is not seeking work, they know the rate is 100% for them. 

The BLS reported that of those who are Unemployed, 2 million searched for work in the past year, 300,000 were discouraged, and 1.2 million believed “no work was available,” “they could not find work,”  “they lacked the necessary schooling or training,” or “the employer thinks they are too young or too old.”  See that at:  ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.cpseea38.txt

• Contract was completed: 28,000
• Seasonal work: 24,627
• Reorganization within Company: 21,159
• Slack work: 14,522
• Business Ownership Change: 8,683
• Financial Difficulty: 5,639
• Not Reported: 5,249
• Bankruptcy:  4,816

The facts are not quite that simple.  In October 93,000 jobs were created, in September 105,000, and in August 80,000.  The BLS estimates it takes 150,000 jobs a month to be created to not have more people unemployed, because that many people enter the workforce. So 450,000 jobs were needed the past three months and 335,000 were created, meaning 115,000 were not able to get jobs.

Our workforce is 143 million people. 4.4% of that means that 6.3 million people are unemployed, not counting the abovementioned newbies in the workforce.  But it’s been estimated there are another 4 to 5 million who are not counted.  That gets you to 10.3 to 11.3 million unemployed.  Dividing that number by the total workforce and you see a real rate of unemployment of 7.2% to 7.9%.

The Vice President then went on to try to scare the voters against voting for Democrats because they “will raise your taxes.”  George Stephanopolis tried to get him to detail it and he said “they don’t have to take action, they can just let the Bush tax cuts expire.” 

George then added, “in 2011.”

Then the Vice President went into a litany of all the tax cuts that would expire if not extended.  But he didn’t refute we’re talking about 2011.  And there are two election cycles before that happens.

George asked why the Republicans, who are in control of Congress, didn’t move to cut the increase in student loans that automatically increased the past year.  VP Cheney didn’t answer.

The Financial Times on 11.03.06 in an editorial titled, “Politicians must focus on middle America” said this:

“The Republicans have presided over a period of exceptional economic growth.  Yet this will not, apparently, win them next week’s mid-term elections.  This is only partly because of the chaos in Iraq and the scandals that beset them.  It is also because middle –income American families have gained so little from the surging economy.

They went on,

“The administration is not responsible for what is happening.  The driving forces are, instead, global and long-standing.  But this does not make the emerging gap between ordinary workers’ productivity and their pay any less of a political challenge.

“Between 2000 and 2005 output per hour worked in the business sector  increased by 17 per cent, while the median hourly wage rose by only 3 per cent.  The total real income of the median household is lower than in 2000, when President George W. Bush was first elected.”

“Trade benefits the economy as a whole, but not everybody.  If the open-ness of which the entire world economy depends is to be sustained politically, winners must be willing to share more of the gains with losers.”

“…in particular, Mr. Bush’s tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 predominantly benefited the rich.”

The New York Times in today’s editorial said this:

“On Tuesday, when this page runs the list of people it has endorsed for election, we will include no Republican Congressional candidates for the first time in our memory…..Our only political loyalty is to making the two-party system as vital and responsible as possible.

“That is why things are different this year.

“To begin with, the Republican majority that has run the House—and for the most part, the Senate—during President Bush’s tenure has done a terrible job on the basics.  Its tax-cutting-above-all-else has wrecked the budget, hobbled the middle class and endangered the long-term economy….

“Republican leaders…have developed toxic symptoms of an overconfident majority that has been too long in power.  They methodically shut the opposition—and even the more moderate members of their own party—out of any role in the legislative process.  Their only mission seems to be self-perpetuation.

“The current Republican majority managed to achieve that burned-our, brain-dead status in record time, and with a shocking disregard for the most minimal ethical standards.  It was bad enough that a party that used to believe in fiscal austerity blew billions on pork-barrel projects.  It is worse that many of the most expensive boondoggles were not even directed at their constituents, but at lobbyists who financed their campaigns and high-end lifestyles.

 “The fact that the White House, House and Senate are all controlled by one party is not a threat to the balance of powers, as long as everyone understands the roles assigned to each by the Constitution.  But over the past two years, the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits.  Rather than doing their duty to curb those excesses, the Congressional Republicans have dedicated themselves to removing the restraints on the president’s ability to do whatever he wants.

“Congress…has failed to ask probing questions about the war in Iraq or hold the president accountable for his catastrophic bungling of the occupation.  It also has allowed Mr. Bush to avoid answering any questions about whether his administration cooked the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.

“This election is indeed about George W. Bush and the Congressional majority’s insistence on protecting him from the consequences of his mistakes and misdeeds.”