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Sources: Dell to close Austin plant, cut up to 900 jobs
Submitted by miss_piggy on Mon, 03/31/2008 - 4:52pm.
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Sources: Dell to close Austin plant, cut up to 900 jobs - [Statesman Business News]
Come on...does anyone in this town really believe that this round of layoffs extends only to the Howard Lane Plant? Or that this is exclusive to manufacturing? The press can only report what they can confirm through sources.
The sad truth is that Dell has been quietly laying people off for weeks in small increments. They don’t have to report “small” incremental layoffs to the press—so this approach really seems to be working for them!
In May 2007, Dell announced that they would cut 10% of their workforce during the next year. In February 2008, they reassured the public that they were going to cut all 8,800 jobs—but that it would take a little longer than they originally anticipated.
To employees, this is a death of a thousand paper cuts! Perhaps revenue would improve if employees felt secure or valued for their contributions.
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I'm sorry to hear this... it doesn't surprise me. I'd heard similar rumors that they were going to close most of the manufacturing in the Austin area for a couple years now.
This is going to be pretty devastating to my neighborhood as it seems like 1/2 the people around work at Dell. We've already seen a lot of turnover (including foreclosures) since 2001, I will be surprised there aren't a whole lot more "FOR SALE" signs popping up this week. Sadly, probably more of the HUD window stickers over the next few months too...
Unfortunately, that may be the case.
I know what you mean. Working in IT I see all kinds of "changes". Makes it difficult to rely on your job to support a family, when the "changes" are so close.
Official announcement...
http://dellshares.dell.com/default.aspx
I will point you to an evolving discussion relating to the Dell layoff:
Kevin Koym's blog
That is a very good read and site! Thanks for the link!
I just talked to a friend of mine yesterday who has been working at the Howard Lane Dell facility for several years. He has been told his job will end in December, which is at least better news than right away. He isn't in a direct manufacturing job, he is sort of an accountant in the inventory control department if my understanding is correct. From what it sounds like all supporting people to that facility are being let go, not just the manufacturing workers. The 900 number may just be the people let go immediately too, the total number may be higher than that by the end of the year.
I didn't work in manufacturing at all. None of my co-workers did either. We were all on the Web, Operations, Marketing, and IT side of the business.
Do you suspect that the number being let go is a lot more than the 900 reported on then?
There is a smaller article on page B7 of the Statesman today about Dell closing a 2nd facility in Austin although they claim that the numbers from that closing are counted in the 900 announcement from Monday.
Sorry - had a meeting:)
Yes, I am positive that they have let more people go than the 900 reported. In the article, they are only referring to this "round" of layoffs.
However, they have been letting other folks go in small, daily increments. I know of Austin-based layoffs that have been occurring since September 2007. That's why the press hasn't reported it.
A friend said there was an article in the Austin Biz Journal today. I'll comment after I've had a chance to review.
That's kind of what I thought... Trying to add things up it looks like Dell still has at least a few thousand more to lay off this year in order to match the number they've promised Wall St.
I read the article in the Statesman.
Yes, they have many more layoffs coming. I'm just saying that most of it has been done under the radar. That many current and former Dell employees are unwilling to talk about it.
Feel free to review the commentary I posted on Kevin's blog.
I'm afraid you are probably right. I couldn't agree more with your commentary. It isn't just Dell either, I've seen the same things myself as I've also endured round after round of layoffs and reorgs over the past several years.
Matt,
Thanks for the post of my blog post. I think that we, the employees and entrepreneurs, are going to have to organize in a way that the world has not seen before... no, I don't mean how Labor was organized in the past. I think that there is a whole new opportunity now to use cutting edge technology (like you are doing here on Door64) to organize ourselves, and create opportunities that before now could only be taken by companies like Dell.
Obviously Dell's structure imploded, at least to a point. I see this as just restructuring- creating an opportunity for more of us to organize businesses, whose net effect is as large as a company like Dell. For example, what has made eBay so powerful is not that eBay has lots of employees, but that eBay has opened up self employment to about 700,000 self-employed full time entrepreneurs. The companies of the future that look most interesting to me are going to participate inside of ecologies like eBay has created... I think that the next "big" computer manufacturer will do this as well. Perhaps in the ashes of what is happening to Dell, a new computer-manufacturing-marketplace-ecology will be created.
What this is going to take- is to remove the sting of getting laid off, and quickly enabling independent actors - entrepreneurs- around Dell.
And of course, many of these former employees will find their way (hopefully!) to whole new types of work that they are much more passionate about.
It sucks that so many people lost their jobs over the last few days... let's just hope that through the restructuring that happens in response to this empowers many, many, more entrepreneurs.
O.K., but how are loosely organized workers going to replace and compete with companies like Dell? Can hundreds of I-build/support-PCs-in-my-bedroom companies make it in Austin? What other things are these people going to do?
To seriously look at answering the question- we have to focus on one specific area... the best way of doing this is to not try to target some idea (like computer manufacturing) but to inquire - what is it that you (and some collection of entrepreneurs) want to be doing.
There are several companies in Austin, started in garages, that are taking advantage of commodity hardware, and building value on top of it.... (an example would be what we did in a previous startup, taking on the Cisco's of the world by putting Linux on commodity hardware, tweaking iptables (a firewall), making it configurable through apache (webserver) and beating Cisco (very large company) on every head to head competition that we came up against them.
In your particular case- since I don't know what the background that you are coming from, I can not suggest specifically what you should be doing to organize like this.
Although, we will be having several more Entrepreneur Town Hall Meetings in the future, at which time we can start to organize entrepreneurs around specific target industries.
I see opportunities like this in biofuels, C02 abatement, electric vehicles, and many, many other technologies...
The key thing to see- innovation has never started at large companies like Dell. Especially now, companies like Dell are going to become very conservative over the coming two years. This is the time that is perfect to strike in the area that you care about.... while Dell (and large comapnies) cut way back, there are many different opportunities that are opening up.
It is hard to really share an idea of this in a quickly written post on a blog. I will talk with Matt about organizing another Entrepreneur Town Hall Meeting (or meetings) to open up a conversation among interested parties in taking these steps towards taking on one or more of these opportunities.
I've been trying to get "LinkedIn" to the startups you are talking about, but I haven't had a lot of luck finding them. If you are interested, my background is not hard to find from my LinkedIn profile, and bio which you can find here.
I hope that the online venue for discussing these things will stay open for those of us who are not always able to attend in person meetings.
Yes, I will do my best to keep it all open. My statement about taking it to a meeting- is really only my reaction to one thing- figuring out how to take action as quickly as possible in helping employees transition to entrepreneurs, and have companies like Dell switch from command-and-control strategies to what I call "ecology" strategies... where these companies leverage many, many more entrepreneurs than they ever thought that they could before.
I just posted an article on my blog about this- evidence that this is already happening around P&G. If it can happen at P&G, then it should be happening at Dell as well.
Our main work for now is getting this activity off the ground to the next level.... taking what we have already created through BootstrapAustin.org and creating the next level of cross-company organizational structures that make true business ecologies (and personal entrepreneurship) possible at a whole new level.
I will be watching and trying to participate as much as I can. I mentioned the PC-from-home business related to Dell for two reasons... one in that that is how Dell got its start, albeit out of a dorm, and the idea of ex-Dell-ers taking on their former employer that way is amusing... On another hand, the PC and support business is what a large portion of those 900+ laid off people know. Coming up with business ideas that you can generate enough income from quickly enough to keep from becoming homeless is not easy for a lot of people. I know that I've got ideas, but most of the ones I think are better I am not in a position to do because they require too much capitalization up front. One former techie I know that abandoned his search for IT work after 3 years of unemployment has been fairly successful at a small business he started buying and selling sports memorabilia (both online and through a small storefront), but he was lucky enough that he had savings to dip into and a spouse that was able to support him through the startup period.
According to the Statesman today, Dell has now completed a net 3,200 of their promised 8,800 job reductions for this year, however Dell representatives are now saying that the cuts will be deeper than the 10% originally promised. This was gleaned from the article about AMD's layoffs announced today.
Yep I have the same as well. I think part of it comes from all the acquisitions that Dell made this past 6-7 months as well. That has brought n a lot of duplicate jobs. Everyone is a bit nervous to say the least.
This seems to be a rhetoric issue. They are just referring to the actual Dell Employees.
In an earlier article, Don Carty refers to actual Dell employees.
Let’s look at this from another perspective. If you take the 3,200 Dell employees that Dell acknowledged in their layoff. Add in the attrition rate, which was high last year after the bonuses were cut. {I think the attrition rate was 17% the year before.} Add in the people who were laid off when Dell acquired their company.
What does that equal? A lot more than the promised 10% job cuts.
I know that additional layoffs have occurred in the past week. Keep in mind that the end of the first quarter is April 30th and sales are not going to meet expectations.
That means a lot of additional layoffs will occur in the next three weeks.
Regardless of rhetoric, this is all bad news for the local job market. Combined with the forthcoming AMD layoffs it is really going to glut the market with people. If any of the other big employers in the area follow suit it could start looking like 2001-2004 all over again.
You're right.
It's not just AMD and Dell. I've run into a lot of folks from Applied Materials and Home Depot.
I'd heard rumors about Applied Materials, but I hadn't heard that Home Depot was laying off too. I will have to check with people I know over there to see what is up.
Now, back to my other question about existing job opportunities, and skills highly sought after in candidates. There's a skills delta between the people that are looking for a job now, and opportunities that remain open (not being filled) due to a perceived requirements deficiency in the applicants.
(Note that I'm skirting the discussion of whether companies should promote on-the-job training versus being overly strict with their job requirements. All that aside, what specific skills are they after that are not being found in our local talent?)
How many of the perpetually unfilled job postings are real jobs, and how many are "non-jobs"? How long do companies leave a job unfilled if there is work that needs to be done before they look at adjusting their requirements or pursuing other avenues for finding candidates?
One of the worst examples of this is IBM, who has had some jobs posted on sites like Dice.com continuously for at least the past two years. And most of these are jobs that by any stretch of the imagination should be hard to fill given the huge gluts of talent available in the Austin area.
I'd really like to know the answer to your question... is there really a "skills shortage" or is it as I hypothesize all just a giant load of bovine droppings?
I'm not a recruiter, but I am in the market for a new job. So this is just my humble opinion. What I've experienced.
People who are in the market to hire for positions are often looking for people that don't currently exist in their particular market. They want "SUPER JOB CANDIDATE". Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, cook a five star meal, and solve world hunger simultaneously.
Seriously, some of the job requisitions that I've seen are really asking for skills that should belong to several different "types" of candidates. (By types I mean categories such as the . accountant/marketer/engineer) But they want all of those skills in one person.
I believe that this has to do with the economy. Companies know they need to hire several people, but they only have enough money to justify hiring one person--that would be "Super Job Candidate" who doesn't yet exist. But they could have that person if they would just suck it up and pay for some job training. It would probably be much more cost effective than continuing to run the same add for months at a time.
Another solution would be to hire two people part time.
This is not a "skills" shortage issue. We live in a society that expects people to be everything to everyone.
I think you are right in some cases. However I think there are also many other types of "non-jobs" -- those jobs that never get filled but keep getting re-posted over and over again... I have to believe that in some cases companies never really intend to hire someone, and in other cases they are just confused about what they want or just as you mention, unrealistic. Its the latter type of cases that are frustrating because as you mention, there are ways to address them if companies were willing to put a little work into it. Unfortunately, I've often found that sincere suggestions on how employers might do things differently to improve their success are more often greeted with disdain or outright anger than they are taken seriously -- assuming they are paid attention to at all.
There are always going to be companies that advertise jobs that aren't really available. There are some companies that use a job description to get you in the door and attempt to sell you a service. It's no different than a car salesperson advertising one car, but showing you a different car when you arrive at the dealership.
Unfortunately, learning who these companies are is part of the process. I suggest becoming a member of Launch Pad Job Club. They are really good about providing this kind of information to their members.
www.launchpadjobclub.com
What you are talking about is the old "bait and switch". I think there are a lot of reasons why companies/agencies post "non-jobs". Building resume databases, trying to find employees that are looking (beware blind ads). Fishing for sales leads, etc...
Unfortunately I had a bad experience with Launch Pad back during the crash when I tried to join their yahoo group and the moderator denied me because she didn't like my yahoo id (softwarejanitor) and sent me a very nasty email.
Here is another Austin company that is off-shoring and laying off workers here:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207100325
350 to 400 over the next few years.