For the startup the approach is different

In Silicon Valley, perhaps more that anywhere else in the United States, it has a habit of cyclical crises. Final result of the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, had plunged the region into economic stagnation until 2005. This experience has at least one advantage: high American technology knows how to deal with these brutal economic swings and is not in the provok to deal with. That is why, since last fall, local businesses the young start-up the less well funded to the number one global computing took the lead. Applying a method that has proven its brutally: immediate post deletions. The month of January alone, more than 35,000 employees sector Americans have thus lost their jobs and February was warmer.

Aside from Apple, all major local groups have already implemented plans for downsizing: the Hewlett-Packard computer giant announced last year a program of 24,000 deletions of posts over three years, the number one telecommunications ATT has provided 12,000, rival Sprint-Nextel more than 8,000 and the leader of the chipmaker Intel 6,000. Even Microsoft is started by dismissing 5,000 employees for the first time in its history. And the champion of the equipment of telecommunications Americans Cisco, rather in the form, he also decided to cut to the heart: CEO, John Chambers, has just announced 2,000 deletions of posts by presenting it as a "strategic repositioning" to be more competitive when the crisis will end.

Adaptation costs

At this rate, the year 2009 should happily exceed the destruction of jobs recorded year 155.000 last in the American understoodas by the firm of reclassification Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

For the start-up, the approach is different. The redundancies are immediate and massive for a simple reason: the goal is to keep enough of cash to spend at least the year 2009 with predictable revenues falling. "Technology companies protect themselves against a year coming catastrophic from the point of view of the commands", confirms Stephen Minton, IDC analyst.

Indeed, layoffs announced by Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Intel, Dell, IBM and others do not mean that these behemoths are about to make their balance sheets. On the contrary, almost all announced profits last year. It is therefore especially adapt their cost structure to a new environment that will not last. And indeed, this adjustment also translates the fact sought to quickly rehabilitate its employees to markets, remaining carriers. When this is not possible, hiring continues: Google and Microsoft continue to recruit in turn arm.

A practice hitherto unpublished

So far, the perception that is going through a crisis very strong, but perhaps short encourages to go further in the "social" management of the event. Thus appeared recently a practice hitherto unpublished: the use of the non-authoritarian wage decreases.

Hewlett-Packard, indeed, presented to the taste of the day a theory proposed by an economist from MIT in the 1980s, Martin Weitzman, professing that it was better to reduce the wage rather dismiss. Left to supplement the salary cut by premiums, bonuses or merit. Martin Weitzman, this approach would be both less traumatic for the employee that his dismissal pure and simple and more efficient for the company that might restart more quickly at the resumed. In Silicon Valley, Advanced Micro Devices or Seagate come to this solution.

Will be provided to a generalization of the declines in wages for the benefit of a variable part It is not safe. The principle of remuneration to the bonus as largely responsible for the excesses of the financial sector that caused the current crisis no longer has the favour of the opinion. Still less that of the new administration Obama. Remains dry layoffs, which are not controversial in the United States, although they emanate profitable groups.