November 11th, 2009
Recovery? This week's pink-slip tally tops 5,000 for tech
What happened to the recovery - the light at the end of the tunnel, the beginning of the end - that big tech companies like Intel are talking about recently? That light, it seems, is still being shadowed by layoffs.
The latest company gearing up to hand out pink slips is semiconductor equipment company Applied Materials, which said on its earnings call today that it was reducing its workforce by 1,300 to 1,500 employees, or 12 percent of its workforce, according to a Dow Jones report.
Those cuts fall on the heels of other announcements this week - the 2.500 jobs being cut at Sprint-Nextel, the 1,500 at Electronic Arts, another 680 over at Adobe and even the 100 at AOL (with more to come, according to All Things D’s Kara Swisher). Add it all up and we top the 5,000 mark for the week - and today’s only Wednesday.
If you want to count by the month, let’s not forget Nokia-Siemens’ plans to cut more than 5,000 jobs or Microsoft’s 800. By my count, that puts us well over 10,000 jobs for November - and I’m sure there are some that I’m not counting and should be, like last month’s 3,000 at Sun.
There’s an old saying that things sometimes have to get worse before they can get better. It seems that this is one of those times.
Sam Diaz is a senior editor at ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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