[HarryD]

Troy,

They say they are done?

Have they make significant changes on how they conduct their business or just lop off some heads, and ask the survivors to pick up the load?

If it is the latter, they may have given themselves some breathing room but the cause of the need to layoff has not been exorcised.

I find it odd that corporate management has convinced themselves that you can "Save your way to propserity". In a captial intensive business, you need to spread the cost of capital equipment over many units. If you are selling less units, reducing the variable cost of labor, does not (on a 1 for 1 basis) improve profit margins (it actually lessens them) or total profitability.

I suspect they read the old (60's) MacKinzie report that says you can chop off 15% of your staff with no impact to your company (since they were doing unecessary work anyway) and enjoy the savings. Since this is a great plan, the Corp MBA's figure you can do this over and over again. Unfortunately, I do not think any of these fellows has every trimmed a steak and dicovered that after you trim all the fat, you are cutting meat and your steak suffers. In addition, if you remove all of the fat from your steak, the taste suffers.

Best of luck. Remember, you are the only one who watches out for #1.