The economy may be slowly emerging from the dumps, but retrenchments are happening even now as companies continue to restructure.
On Monday, American computer giant Hewlett-Packard was the latest to issue the pink slips - among the retrenched were at least one director and several senior engineers - paying out a month's salary for every year of service, to a maximum of 12 months' salary.
The retrenchments at HP's Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) unit, which work on printer designs, are part of the company's plan to streamline its operations to target high growth opportunities, said a company spokeswoman in Singapore.
She declined to say how many people were laid off, but added that HP would try to redeploy affected staff. Those who cannot be relocated will have to go.
"As part of the IPG operations unit transformation, the company announced plans in August to re-align the organisation in an effort to optimise and improve its supply chain," she said in an email reply to MediaCorp.
"As part of this realignment, some investments and resources will be shifted to help fuel high-growth areas for IPG's business. In other areas, it has resulted in a reduction of resources, including workforce reduction."
The decision to retrench was "made at a global level and is not specific to any one HP site", she said.
In May, HP laid off workers in the same department, citing similar reasons.
Some staff, apart from being surprised at the timing of the latest lay-offs, are wondering why HP did not convey in writing its decision on the retrenchment exercise, instead of relaying the news verbally in a low key fashion.
One retrenched employee told MediaCorp he was disappointed about the situation. He had worked for over five years at the company, and said he personally knew 20 of the others who were retrenched.
"There were many more who were laid off," he said. "At the end of the day, retrenchment is all about cost reduction."
Responding, the HP spokeswoman said employees were told in advance of the exercise, "in accordance with local industry practice and Ministry of Manpower guidelines".
Another employee, who worked at the company for almost 15 years, is taking the retrenchment in stride.
"Life doesn't end here," said the man, who is in his 40s. "It's a one-year (severance) package. I can still look around for a job."
The timing of the retrenchment did not surprise National Trades Union Congress deputy secretary-general Halimah Yacob, especially when the reasons were pegged to restructuring.
"This has also happened when there is no recession," said Mdm Halimah. "When they do their global or local review on operations, they always look at costs and competitiveness and how best they can do their productions."
According to her, a manufacturing firm laid off 300 of its staff - or 20 per cent of its workforce - last month after it relocated its printed circuit board department to a regional country, as part of restructuring.
- TODAY newspaper
No comments:
Post a Comment