Unit 4 Downsizing
裁员
空口言
Adom Cohen, Cathy Booth Thomas
1. The e-mail looked harmless enough. Be at the Renaissance Austin Hotel, 20
银色情人节
minutes away, in about an hour. Just another stupid meeting, no doubt. But by the time Dell information technology specialist Chuck Peterson walked into a room filled with 75 of his co-workers and a few managers he had never en before, he knew what was up. “None of them would look at us,” he says. “They had their backs to us or they were looking at their feet.”
这封E-mail看起来并没有任何伤害。在Renaissance Austin旅馆召开会议，到旅馆的路程是二十分钟路程，大约一个小时后召开。毫无疑问，又不过是一个无聊的会议。但是，当戴尔公司信息技术专家Chuck Peterson步入房间那一刻，就知道要发生什么了，房间里是他的75个同事和几个以前从来没有见过的经理。“他们没人看我，“他说，”他们都背对着我或是看着他们自己的脚“。
2. The boss stuck to their script. The economy is bad. We can’t afford to keep
齐国力
you. So we’re not. Hand in your badges on the way out. There were no individual explanations for why the workers－out of a work force of 40,000－had been picked. The members of the firing squad never even introduced themlves. It was over in eight minutes.
这些上司们除了照着讲稿没有多讲一句话。经济形势不好，我们无法支付雇用你们的开支，所以不雇你们了。出门的时候上交你们的公司证章。对于为什么是这些人从40000名员工被挑出来，没有做个别的解释。解聘小组的成员甚至都没做自我介绍。一切在八分钟内就结束了。
3. Peterson, 40, is one of 1,700 full-time Dell workers who lost their jobs since
February, in an economy that has been shedding 100,000 workers a month since the beginning of the year. Last week Winstar Communications, once a wireless wonder, hung up on 2,000 employees－44% of its staff. TiVo, Sycamore Networks and Extreme Networks added more bodies to the tech ctor’s growing pile. AOL Time Warner has announced 2,400 job cuts in respon to the slowing economy and pressure from Wall Street. By week’s end unemployment had hit 4.3%, a slight but ominous ri. Wor, job creation was down, more evidence that recession is at hand.
Peterson，40岁，是自二月份以来戴尔公司解雇的1700名全职工人的一员，整个经济环境如此，从年初的一个月就有100，000人被解雇。上周，星胜通讯公司，一度是无线行业的奇迹，解雇了2000名
雇员－－占其员工总数的44％。TiVo，美国光纤网络公司和极进网络公司也加入了裁员大军当中。美国在线时代华纳集团宣布削
懊悔的意思是什么
减2400个工作职位以应对缓慢的经济增长和华尔街的压力。到周末，失业率已达4.3%，裁员人数增长虽然很小却是不祥之兆。更糟的是，工作机会在减少，越来越多的迹象表明经济衰退即将到来。
4. Dell’s cuts illustrate both the abruptness of the downturn and the almost chaotic
nature of today’s layoffs, even for companies trying to do right. Dell isn’t a Rust Belt dinosaur or a business-plan-and –a-prayer dotcom. Its workers helped write one of the great business success stories of modern times. Dell was founded in 1984 to ll computers without a middleman (Direct from Dell, the ads said). Its hyper efficient model helped it pass Compaq to become North America’s largest PC manufacturer. Nor is Dell’s good news all behind it. Just last Thursday, Dell almost single-handedly ran the Dow up 400 points when it confirmed that first-quarter profit estimates were on track. Last year the company earned ＄2.3 billion on sales of ＄32 billion.
戴尔公司的裁员表明经济衰退的突发性和目前裁员近乎混乱的特性，哪怕是想把裁员这件事情做好的公司也不得不面对。戴尔公司并不是老工业区即将跨掉的老式公司，也不是初具创业理念仍就战战兢兢的网络公司。它的员工书写了现代社会伟大的商业传奇。戴尔公司创于1984年，它不通过中间商出
售电脑（直接来自戴尔，广告是这么说的）。这种高效运营模式使其超过了康柏，一举成为北美最大的PC机生产商。戴尔公司的好消息远不止于此。就在上周四，当证实其第一季度的利润即将实现，几乎仅此一项就让道琼斯指数上升了400点。去年，该公司销售额320亿美元，盈利23亿美元。
孩子叛逆期如何教育
5. Many of the fired workers and their supporters are attacking the cuts as
unnecessary and poorly handled－and antithetical to the company Michael Dell created. The Dell culture is fiercely meritocratic, with workers expected to do whatever it takes to make the company succeed. The reward: rich option packages that turned many thirtyish tech workers into millionaires or, as Austin calls them, Dellionaires.
许多被解雇的员工以及他们的支持者都抨击裁员是没有必要并且处理拙劣――这也违背了Michael Dell创建公司的原则。戴尔公司的企业文化是强烈的精英管理文化，它鼓励员工去做任何能使公司成功的事情。作为回报：它提供丰厚的一揽子股权利益，这使得许多三十多岁的技术工人变成百万富翁，或者按奥斯汀人的叫法是戴尔富翁。
6. Dell says it did not undertake the cuts lightly. “It’s one of the hardest, most
gut-wrenching decisions you can make as a leader,” Michael Dell told Time. The layoffs are, he admi
ts, “an admission that we screwed up” by overhiring. If there’s a lesson, he says, it’s that “when things heat up quite a bit, we should take some pau.”
戴尔说在裁员这件事情上，公司也做的不轻松。戴尔告诉时代周刊说：“作为公司的决策者，裁员是最困难的，最令人揪心的决定之一。”他坦诚道，裁员等于是承认了公司在过度招聘上做错了。如果说这是一个教训，他说，那就是“当事情升温到一定程度，就必须打住。”
7. The company insists it tried to handle the layoffs as humanely as possible. Dell
gave terminated workers their yearly bonus early, and it handed out verance packages of two months’ salary and two months of insurance coverage. Dell is also paying for job counling.
公司坚持说它还在尽力使得裁员更人情味。戴尔公司给那些解聘的工人提前发放了年终奖金，还支付了两个月的薪水作为解聘补偿和两个月的保险。戴尔还支付了就业咨询的费用。
8. Not every employee got the bad news as impersonally as Peterson. When nior
recruiter Kathleen Sullivan, 47, was let go, her boss led her from her cubicle into
a “team room” where they could have some privacy. He apologized profuly
and said he hoped they would stay in touch. “Then a tear started rolling down his cheek,” she says. “I’m getting laid off, and I’m asking him if he needed a Kleenex.”
并不是每个雇员都像Peterson一样没有人情味地接到解雇的坏消息。当47 岁的高级招聘员Kathleen Sullivan被解聘时，他的老板把她从大办公室的隔间叫到了一个套间，以便他们不被人打扰。他多次地道歉并说希望能保持联系。“然后，泪水从他的脸上滚落，”她说，“我被解雇了，但我还在问他是否需要面巾纸。”
9. But the pain was mostly hers. Sullivan had initially resisted going to Dell. But
when it recruited her, she was enticed by the high pay, the retirement plan, the stock options and the heady work environment. During the boom, she says, she once hired 600 people in five weeks. Dell hired 16,000 workers in the past two years alone.
但最痛苦的还是她，Sullivan曾经拒绝到Dell来工作。但当公司招聘她时，高额的报酬，退休计划，股票利益以及令人兴奋的工作环境吸引了她。她说在公司的繁荣时期，她曾在五周内招募了600人。单单在过去的两年里，Dell公司招募了16，000个员工。
10. W ith money tight ,there was pressure to cut back on departments that didn’t
generate revenue—administration, marketing and recruiting. Dell was also pushing to have in-hou managers do more of their own job interviewing, leaving less work for Sullivan. Echoing Michael Dell, Sullivan blames the company for not doing a better job of anticipating work-force needs. “This is the first time I heard about reducing numbers,” she says. “The company was growing too fast, and we didn’t take a long view and look at what we had.”
当资金变得紧张起来，那些不产生收益的部门，诸如管理部门，市场部门和招聘部门都面临着被裁减的压力。Dell还让业务经理们做他们职权以外的面试工作，留给Sullivan更少的工作。响应Michael Dell，Sullivan谴责公司在作人力需求计划工作时没有做好。“公司增长得太快了，我们没有做好长远的打算，也没有考虑好我们都有什么。”零售行业
11. G ary Davidson’s firing was mercifully brief. Davidson, 39, a network
administrator in a factory that makes laptops, got to work at 7:, and his boss called him into the human-resources building. He was told that he was history and was asked to hand over his badge, cell phone and corporate cards.
银河
“They gave me the option of coming back later to clean out my desk,” he says.
“By 7:, I was out.”
Gary Davidson的解雇过程是仁慈的摘要版。39岁的Davidson是一家笔记本电脑制造厂的网络管理员。他早上7:30上班，老板打来电话叫他去人力资源办公楼。他被告知被解雇了，要求上交公司证章、手机和公司卡。“他们给我的选项就是晚些时候回来清理我的办公桌，”他说，“早上7:45分，我离开了公司。”
心中的梦想
12. T he news didn’t come as a complete shock. When Davidson started out, money
ran freely. “The mood was, ‘Gosh, Dell has oodles of loot,’ ” he says. “ ‘Let’s just spend, spend, spend.’ ” But a year ago, when the dotcom bubble burst, everything changed. It was harder to get anything more than a bare-bones computer to work on, and training was halted for veral months. “You could practically hear the screws being tightened,” says Davidson.
解聘这个消息并不是完全让人震惊的。Davidson刚开始工作时，花钱是很自由的。他说：“那心情就是，‘天呐，戴尔公司这么有钱。我们就花吧，花吧，花吧。’”但一年前，当网络泡沫破碎时，一切都变了。除了工作用的最基本的计算机外很难再拿到其他东西了，培训也停了好几个月。“你可以感到公司的资金在收紧。” Davidson说。
13. B y early this year, rumors were rampant that job cuts were coming. But Dell
traditionally kept a 10% to 30% buffer of temps and contractors, who normally get the boot during slow times. The company usually lays off an additional 10% of full-time staff after annual evaluations in February. The regular staff had hoped that tho traditional purges, which happened again this year, would be all that were needed.
到今年早些时候，关于公司裁员一事已是流言四起。但是, 通常戴尔公司按照传统有占到员工总数的10%至30%的临时工和合同工，这些员工通常会在公司不景气时被解雇。公司一般会在每年二月份的考评后解雇额外10％的全日制员工。正式员工曾希望今年的裁员和以往一样，只是裁减临时工和合同工就可以了.
14. M any of the fired workers object to the way they were let go. Just days before
D-day, as Feb. 15 is now known at Dell, management was denying planned job cuts. On D-day, officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety showed up at the Dell campus to escort the doomed to their cars. Workers were encouraged to sign “the bribe,” an agreement not to discuss their packager or sue Dell, in exchange for up to four extra weeks of verance.
许多被解雇员工反对他们被解雇的方式。就在2月15号，计划行动开始前几天，管理部门否认有计划的裁员。在实行裁员当天，德克萨斯州公共安全部警员出现在戴尔园区，由他们护送这批注定被解雇
的员工上车。公司鼓励被解雇员工签署一项“贿赂”协议，该协议中要求他们不将解聘的补偿金告诉他人或是不准备起诉戴尔公司，作为交换，戴尔提供给他们高达解聘前四周的工资的补偿金。
15. O ne of the biggest complaints among redundant Dell workers is that the
company has not explained how it cho whom to fire. Dell rigorously evaluates its employees, ranking each on a descending 1-to-5 scale; fives get fired first.
But performance didn’t em to matter this time. “The first guy in my department to go was the cond highest rated on the team,” says Davidson. “It was more like a shotgun blast, or a lottery.”
被解雇员工的最大一个抱怨就是公司没有解释它是如何选择被解雇人员的。戴尔公司严厉的考评其员工，按1：5的递减比例排队，5是首先被裁员的。但是员工的绩效表现这一次似乎并不起作用。Davidson说“我这个部门第一个走的是团队中第二好的，它更像一次猎枪爆炸或是一次抽奖。
16. S ome of the workers let go accu Dell of targeting older, more highly paid
workers. “The people left are not the ones who built the company,” says Peterson. “We did all the sweat, and now they’re getting our stock options.” Dell counters that older workers who say they were singled out are just expressing sour grapes or don’t understand where they fit in the process.
一些被解雇的员工指责戴尔公司解雇对象是年纪较大，工资较高的员工。Peterson说，“那些留下来的并不是创建公司的人，我们流尽了汗，现在他们却持有我们的公司股权。”戴尔公司反驳道，那些年纪大的员工说他们是因为年龄的原因被选出来，恰恰说明了这些人的酸葡萄心理或者他们不明白自己在公司发展中的位置。17. S ome say management’s choices don’t make business n. Randy Schleicher,
52, who lost his job as a network analyst, says he heard from someone still employed at Dell that the plant making computer portables was on hold for an hour becau there wasn’t enough tech help after the job cuts. At ＄11,000 a minute, he says, that would be an expensive delay.
有些人说管理部门解聘人员的选择是没有商业意义的。Randy Schleicher,52岁，解雇前是网络分析师。他说他从仍在戴尔公司留任的员工那听说，便携式电脑制造厂因为裁员导致没有足够的技术支持而被迫停工一小时。他说，一分钟的损失是11000美元，这是昂贵的耽误。
18. M ore broadly, economists are now questioning whether large scale headcount
reductions are cost-effective. Kim Cameron, professor of management at the University of Michigan Business School, says studies from 1986 to 1992 show that companies that laid off workers went on to trail their industries in productivity, profitability and shareholder value. “A lot of downsizing is simpl
y done as a message to external constituencies, especially Wall Street,” he says. Dell’s stock, for instance, ro 9% the day the cuts were announced. It had fallen 62% since March 2000, putting heat on Dell for this kind of move.
更广泛的，经济学家现在质疑大规模的人员裁减是否合算。Kim Cameron，密歇根州大学商学院管理学教授，他说从1986到1992年的研究显示，那些曾裁员的公司在其行业内的生产力、盈利和股东价值继续走低。“很多裁员仅仅是给外界特别是华尔街传递一个信息,”他说。例如，戴尔公司的股票在其宣布裁员当天就上升了9个百分点。自2000年3月以来，它已经跌了62个百分点，这使得戴尔公司下决心来裁员。
19. I n theory, the fired Dell workers should land on their feet. Most have highly
marketable skills, and unemployment in the area is near 2%. Every day they troop to a “career center” in northwest Austin. They check out websites like computer jobs. com and a bulletin board that boasts 30 “success stories”—only limited consolation given that companies where they might naturally land—Intel,
