This morning four companies announced they’d be cutting almost 8,000 jobs. The greatest number of layoffs was announced by Pittsburgh-based PNC:
The biggest cuts were declared by regional bank PNC (PNC, Fortune 500), based in Pittsburgh, which said it plans to reduce 5,800 jobs through 2011 from its current base of 59,595 positions.
PNC said it was reducing its staff in the wake of last year’s acquisition of National City. PNC acquired the bank for $5.6 billion after receiving $7.5 billion in TARP funds.
Liz Clairborne (LIZ, Fortune 500), a New York-based retailer of women’s clothing, said it was cutting costs by eliminating 725 jobs, or 8% of its workforce.
The retailer said the reductions would come on top of 2,200 jobs it has eliminated since 2007.
“While reducing head count is not the only cost cutting measure being implemented, it is certainly the most difficult,” Chief Executive Officer William McComb said in a press release.
King Pharmaceuticals (KG), based in Bristol, Tenn., announced that it would reduce its workforce by 22%, or 760 jobs.
The drugmaker said that 240 of the job cuts are associated with its 2008 acquisition of Alpharma, another drug company.
Rockwell Collins (COL), a maker of aviation electronics based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, plans to eliminate 600 jobs, including 500 employees and 100 contractors.
These jobs cuts come on top of the 300,000 jobs that 96 companies have announced would be lost so far this year. The companies involved in these latest announcements are from four different sectors of the economy: banking and financial services, retail, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, and aerospace. It’s hard to see where to look for a bright spot.
Anecdotally, I can tell you that bankruptcy lawyers are doing quite well.
Some day I’ll have to post my thoughts on the practice of law (I come from a lawyer’s family, you know). Some lawyers will do just fine whatever the state of the general economy; many will not.
However, the practice of law doesn’t help us with much prescriptive information. It’s exceptional in a lot of ways.
My understanding is that the government retains an equity interest in PNC, but that PNC was ordered to sell off or close some of its branches due to anti-trust concerns. It seemed clear that the merger of these two banks was going to result in job losses, but TARP was never about preserving jobs in the financial industry.
Not only that but if the estimates of the actual value of the financial sector to the greater economy are correct a heckuva lot of jobs will need to be lost or a lot of top echelon salaries will need to be cut, unfortunately somewhat less likely, for that to happen. Ain’t much that can be done about it.
However, my larger point remains: where’s the bright spot? It’s pretty hard for me to see what’s going to lead the recovery.
I work next door to the attorney registration and disciplinary office for my state and I’ve asked if complaints were picking up with the bad economy.
Nope. Seems that when the economy is bad, lawyers are more responsive to client’s calls and concerns. I gather that a lot of the complaints received are either about lack of communication from the attorney or originate there.
But I was told that the business is looking bad in smaller communities (say under 100,000). He thought there were too many lawyers in the state to be viable.
One of the many things that people don’t understand about the practice of law is that while the mean salary for lawyers is excellent, the median is only so-so—the sigma is very high. There are tons of lawyers out there barely scraping by. That’s always been true.
The situation you’ve described has been true for a decade in California which IIRC has the highest number of lawyers per 100,000 in the country. One of my best high school buddies is a lawyer in San Diego. He’s a very smart, extremely personable guy and tells me that things are pretty tough for lawyers there.
Having a wife who was laid off last year by PNC (after a different bank buy-up) probably taints my opinion of them. On the other hand, it gives me a bit of insider information. Let’s just say their management is my nightmare version of bankers: ruthlessly self-interested, profit-obsessed, and not very smart.
I also have a sister who’s one of those middle-of-the-pack lawyers, with a huge law school debt yet to pay. If top lawyers deserve their reputation as predators, they earn it devouring the smaller fish in the tank.
More than 60 years ago my dad, at that time a young associate, emerged from the collapse in scandal of the biggest law firm in St. Louis at the time with a number of plum clients. He became something of a rarity: a decent, honorable, hard-working lawyer making a decent go of it as a sole practitioner while maintaining a decent family life. A wide reputation for being the smartest lawyer in town. He died when I was 18.
When I graduated from college I took the LSAT’s. I scored in the 93rd percentile which, oddly, disappointed me at the time although I suspect it would have gotten me into nearly any school I wanted.
I elected not to go to law school because, looking around, I realized I’d need to work as an associate for a big firm and I had a pretty good idea what that’d be like. I decided it wasn’t for me. The path not taken. My life would’ve been very different had my dad lived four more years.
Many of his clients were banks and insurance companies and, consequently, I grew up with bankers and insurance company folks as family friends. As well as newspaper people since one of my dad’s best college friends was the managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Law, along with academe, are my two untaken paths. Until journalism decided to flush itself down the toilet, I felt pretty good about my choice.