OK, I've heard about SD.Net members getting fired from their companies running into trouble, now there's a mass spate of reduncancies in large companies close to home:
Bristol staff in tears at Orange call centre closure shock
Mobile phone giant delivered a New Year "bombshell" to staff today by announcing plans to close a call centre with the loss of 300 jobs. The Communication Workers Union said staff at the site in Bristol broke down in tears after being told the grim news in a meeting with managers. The company had to close the centre for the day because workers were so shocked and upset, according to the union. "This bombshell is a betrayal of a loyal and hard-working workforce," said a union spokesman.
"People have struggled into work through appalling weather only to be told they are losing their jobs.
The CWU said there had been rumours of job losses ahead of today's meeting, adding that no one had expected "blanket" redundancies to be announced. See tomorrow's Bristol Evening Post and thisisbristol for reaction to the shock announcement.
Orange (the company) sucks and they'll have foreign branches take up the slack, but on a related note it's even worse at AOL and even at Airbus. It's the jobless recovery!
'Alright guard, begin the unnecessarily slow moving dipping mechanism...' - Dr. Evil
'Secondly, I don't see why "income inequality" is a bad thing. Poverty is not an injustice. There is no such thing as causes for poverty, only causes for wealth. Poverty is not a wrong, but taking money from those who have it to equalize incomes is basically theft, which is wrong.' - Typical Randroid
'I think it's gone a little bit wrong.' - The Doctor
I don’t know how AOL even still exists myself after losing as much money as it could and having its stock value down something like 95% from its peak. I heard they were doing well in the third world for a number of years after they were largely vanquished from the US, but now even that market has to be pretty well tapped out in terms of easy money.
Airbus was inherently retarded in accepting any kind of fixed price military contract which involved such demanding specifications and the use of very new manufacturing technology in just about every major aspect of the design. If it was just a conventional aluminum flying box powered by an existing engine, this might have been okay, but instead it was a carbon fiber low level capable tactical airlifter with a new engine, which was supposed to pack near strategic range into a theater scale airframe… nothing could go wrong right?
Now they’ve already cut all the advanced tactical features like terrain following autopilot, and it still doesn’t work so the only thing to do is spend more money redesigning or else relax specifications. No one wants to pay for the former, doing the latter would leave the plane with a marginal advance over a C-130 and kill all hope of exports. And to round it off it seems that even relaxing specifications and using the existing design still doesn’t solve the problem, because they’d still need more money to cover production.
It would have been smarter to just put European engines on the C-17, the plane everyone blatantly wanted, or buy it stock or buy the An-70 even, but this would involve logic. A400M was never about that. But hey, jobs! Just really expensive insecure ones. I think someone will come up with more money in any case.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
