Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

The two words, in the American lexicon, are never good. Pink slip. The first time I ever heard it when I was young was when Kaiser Steel handed out pink slips to many of my neighbors and relatives. Layoffs were about efficiency, sales figures for raw materials or refrigerators.

For a hot-shot CEO taking over a troubled company, mass firings are the ultimate quick fix, the accounting equivalent of crack: cheap, easy to score, instantly gratifying, and highly addictive.

But I don't want massive layoffs of anyone - public or private. We are planning on shrinking government through attrition and reform, not through random pink slips.

There is no denying that downsizing can happen when a company receives private equity funding. It is unfortunate and hard on everyone who is affected.

The corporate killer downsizing is directly responsive to what the mutual funds have wanted.

We wanted to preserve as many jobs as possible, so when our sales continued to decline in August 2008, we did about a 5 percent reduction of our global staff. But in order not to cut any more jobs, we froze everybody's pay and put a hiring freeze on.

We've lost 400,000 jobs in Michigan because of downsizing.

Strong managers who make tough decisions to cut jobs provide the only true job security in today's world. Weak managers are the problem. Weak managers destroy jobs.

From a productivity standpoint, you're supposed to reduce headcount on par with declining revenue. If you believe the environment isn't going to improve, you should take a bigger cut to get in front of the problems.

Nothing kills your company's culture like layoffs.

Sometimes people have a hard time believing that a company is intentionally trying to make itself smaller.

A restructuring of an organisation is always a difficult time and delicate.

I'd say she's get us both fired, but the I.S. doesn't let anyone go. Alive.

I think re-engineering or restructuring or downsizing or rightsizing or whatever you want to call it, it's basically firing, has gone way too far. Employees, as I've talked to them across the country, feel that they are not respected, they are not valued, they are worried about their jobs. They simply feel that the company is no longer loyal to them. Why should they be loyal to the company, they ask me. Why should I go the extra mile? Why should I care?

Many companies today are reducing hours of full-time people to get under the minimum so they don't have to pay health care costs. I just shake my head because that's not going to build long-term value and trust with your people.

Certainly it's a business and you've got to have a salesman, but in my mind, when you've got two guys doing the same thing, you don't need one of them.

We will downsize the government, motivate excess employees to become entrepreneurs, and increase the pay of a lean and mean bureaucracy.

From the very first time I talked to Safeco employees, I said the reality was expenses were too high and the reality is two-thirds of our expenses are people, so the reality is there will be effects on people.

This has been a trend for a long time; the days of lifetime employment are long since over.

Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.

We held the team together for as long as possible and then sent all except the most critical personnel home.

There is no way I could ever look somebody in the eye and say that I can make them feel good about the fact that they are losing their job.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

Things are bad in 2001 at Yahoo. There's been layoffs, restructuring, lots of people left.

Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.