Your new post is loading...
United Technologies is at the top of its game but recently announced big layoffs. Is this the new normal?...
... This growth was accomplished, however, without expanding its workforce much at all, and now UT believes it can continue to grow as it wants to while actually shrinking its employee base. It's planning to lay off 3000 workers this year, after shedding 4000 last year. Now, is this really anything new? After all, output has been going up and employment simultaneously going down in manufacturing around the world for several years now, and UTC is a big manufacturer.
But two things strike me as potentially novel here. First, the company does a lot more than just make things in factories. As its website says, "United Technologies... is a diversified company that provides a broad range of high-technology products and services to the global aerospace and building systems industries." Servicing elevators, security systems, and so on, in other words, is a big part of what UTC does, and services have historically been very labor-intensive. That could be changing....
If this is a trend, it's both baffling and concerning. In addition to the need to rewrite the social contract, how can you communicate this situation without a reputation hit?