Yet another mass layoff notice from the health care industry, as reported by Twin Cities.com:
Fridley-based Medtronic is eliminating about 220 jobs in its division for heart rhythm devices.
The business unit, which is headquartered in Mounds View, makes pacemakers and implantable cardiac defibrillators, which shock failing hearts back into rhythm.
Sales of the heart devices have been sluggish for years. In previous years, Medtronic also has announced job cuts during the month of May, shortly after the close of the company's fiscal year in late April.
"They have to keep right-sizing the business to reflect the future prospects," said Tim Nelson, an analyst with Nuveen Asset Management. "I think this was a lot of Minnesota-focused people. It came with a pretty significant reorganization in product development."
Medtronic employs about 8,000 people in Minnesota.
Kathleen Janasz, a company spokeswoman, would not comment on the types of jobs eliminated or the location of affected workers. The reductions are being accomplished through a combination of buyouts and layoffs, Janasz said, adding that those facing involuntary separation are being given benefits including severance pay.
"General managers are now leading the business," she said of a reorganization that's part of the downsizing. "We believe that this is the right model that will be supportive in bringing new products to market faster and being more efficient in doing so."
Yep, because firing workers ALWAYS results in greater production and efficiency. So what is the real reason behind this announcement?
Growth in the market has been hurt by a series of product recalls over the years and, most recently, a federal investigation into whether implantable defibrillators have been over-prescribed. The device systems can cost up to $30,000.
Nelson said the job cuts reflected the sluggish outlook for heart rhythm devices. "This is endemic of a very slow growing - in fact declining - market," the analyst said. "Even though the signs are that things may be stabilizing a bit, they're still down."
So, it was a crackdown on unnecessary medical procedures being performed in the name of higher corporate profits. At this point, I'm pretty much beyond being surprised by this kind of stuff.
The political nervous breakdown of the Republican Party seems to be accelerating. By now it should be readily apparent to any observer who reamins even somewhat tenuously connected to reality that, in the wake of their victories in the 2010 midterm elections, the Republicans have dangerously overstepped their supposed mandate. Of course, this was entirely predictable given the officially sanctioned media narrative that Obama and the Democrats lost because they supposedly overreached, when in fact the opposite was true. Enthusiasm for President Hopey-Changey on the part of his own supporters waned dramatically as it became apparent that he was determined to do little more than carry on the disastrous Bush economic policies which got us into this mess in the first place.
The politically smart thing for the Republicans to do would have been to hammer on Obama for essentially giving Wall Street a pass on crashing the economy and causing the economic crisis. But since they are even more in the pockets of the oligarchs than are the Democrats, they obviously could not do that. So their strategy was to obstruct Obama even on the tepid reforms he did try to push while whipping up the culture war politics that had served them so well back when George Bush the Lesser was still happily farting behing the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
The problem for the Republicans was that they had pretty much gotten all the mileage they could get out of gay bashing, so they needed to look around for other ripe targets to rile up their troglodyte base. One choice was to take the war against "feminazis" to the next level, which explains the utterly misguided recent campaigns against not only abortion but contraception. The other and perhaps even more unfortunate tact was to ramp up the demonization of the poor at precisely the time when tens of millions of people are still suffering from the effects of the economic crash.
This "war on the poor" hit another low point with the recent comments from State Representative Mary Franson, who compared the Food Stamp program to "feeding wild animals." Here is The Raw Story with the details:
One Republican lawmaker in Minnesota expressed a peculiar but existing belief in GOP circles Friday afternoon, claiming that food stamps recipients are virtually similar to feeding wild animals.
State Rep. Mary Franson released a Youtube video describing her hopes of reducing the amount of time residents in Minnesota could stay on food stamps from five years to three.
“And here, it’s kind of ironic, I’ll read you this little funny clip that we got from a friend,” she said. “It says, ‘Isn’t it ironic that the food stamp program, part of the Department of Agriculture, is pleased to be distributing the greatest amount of food stamps ever. Meanwhile, the Park Service, also part of the Department of Agriculture, asks us to please not feed the animals, because the animals may grow dependent and not learn to take care of themselves.”
Franson is not the first Republican to make this comparison. In 2010, then South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer said exactly the same thing.
According to the USDA, Todd County in Franson’s district contains one of Minnesota’s highest poverty rates, with 16.9 precent of residents in 2010.
That last sentence is particularly galling since it's not like this dingbat represents some lilly white prosperous suburb where poor folks are rare. Presumably, she is in a position to see with her own eyes what the economic crisis has done to her own community, and yet she's such a psychopath that it has obviously elicited exactly zero feelings of empathy in her. Nationally, of course, you would think that someone on the Republican side would recognize that bashing the poor is not a smart strategy when there are now so many more of them than there were a few years ago, but the party obviously got so used to claiming it creates its own reality that it has now made the fatal error of believing its own press clippings.
The biggest beneficiary of such audacious heartlessness, of course, is President Hopey-Changey himself. Absent another crash in the financial markets between now and November, all Obama will have to do is keep doing what he has been doing: pay lip service to being on the side of those who are hurting while continuing to take big fat campaign checks from Wall Street and pointing the finger at all of the crazy rhetoric spewing forth from the Republican side. In this manner he could breeze through to reelection without making any concrete promises to take on the oligarchs and start restoring basic fairness to the system. It's almost enough to make you wonder if useful idiots like Minnesota State Representative Mary Franson are secretly on the payroll of the president's reelection campaign.
Bonus: A song from a guy who actually does have a little empathy for the downtrodden
Once in awhile, the corporate flacks really tie themselves up in knots with these layoff announcements Here is the Minneapolis -St. Paul Business Journal with the details:
Supervalu Inc. said Tuesday it is eliminating 800 jobs from its corporate and regional offices nationwide as part of its yearlong effort to cut costs and offer more competitive grocery prices.
Supervalu said in a news release the cuts include layoffs of current employees and open jobs that won't be filled. The grocer expects most of the cuts to be done by Feb. 25, the end of the company's fiscal year.
About 200 jobs are being cut at the company's Eden Prairie headquarters, representing about 7 percent of its headquarters staff.
So far, pretty standard stuff, but check this out:
"These reductions are necessary to help further strengthen and accelerate Supervalu's business turnaround in a very competitive marketplace," Supervalu CEO Craig Herkert said in the news release.
A month ago, Supervalu said its turnaround plan was still on course despite reporting a widening loss in the third quarter. Sales were down 4 percent for the quarter that ended Dec. 3.
There's only one thing proper reaction to that: Dooooooooh!
Sorry, the headline to this post is just me being a smart ass again. The Regis in question is not the teevee talk and game show host of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire fame, but rather a company that apparently owns a shit pot load of hair care salons. Here is Twin Cities Business reporting the story along with the announcement that the Regis CEO is stepping down:
The Edina-based hair-care company made that announcement Thursday—and separately confirmed that it laid off 110 employees at its corporate office this week. Further details about the job cuts weren’t immediately available mid-day Thursday.
Details may not have been available, but the reason for the (ahem) haircut in staffing levels was:
Regis has struggled and trimmed expenses in recent years as consumers have reduced the frequency of their salon visits amid the recession. Its net income dropped more than 79 percent in the fiscal year that ended in June 2011, and it reported a net loss totaling $8.9 million. Revenue, meanwhile, fell about 1.4 percent to $2.32 billion during the period—an improvement from a 3 percent drop the previous year.
For second quarter that ended in December, the company’s revenue was down 1.9 percent to $492.1 million—and Regis reported a net loss of $57.4 million, or $1.01 per share, a sharp contrast to $14.5 million in net income for the second quarter of the prior fiscal year; the loss was prompted by a $77 million after-tax, non-cash charge related to a goodwill writedown for the company’s Hair Restoration Centers. Excluding one-time charges, Regis’ second-quarter earnings were 32 cents per share, higher than the 23 cents per share expected by analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.
Regis, one of Minnesota’s 25-largest public companies based on revenue, operates more than 12,800 salons, cosmetology education centers, and hair restoration centers worldwide—including franchised locations.
So was there any corporate FlackSpeak attached to this announcement? You bet you your hair extensions there was:
Regis’ lead independent Director Joel Conner said in a Thursday statement that the company’s new CEO will “focus on a compelling customer experience and deliver a substantial increase in shareholder value.”
He added: “Today’s announcements reflect the company’s commitment to enhanced shareholder value and strong corporate governance. The board has heard the concerns from shareholders with respect to governance and compensation practices, and we are moving quickly in response.”
In other words, the board said "fire some of those slackjawed deadbeats on your staff and increase our share values, pronto!" Because THAT is the new American Way.
One of the more interesting examples of a corporation refusing to acknowledge reality and just die already is the slow motion collapse of Blockbuster Video. The chain has been steadily closing locations for years as On Demand, Netflix and now downloading have utterly destroyed its brick and mortar business model. Of course, that was after the chain itself ran most of the mom-and-pop video stores around the country out of business. Here is the Minneapolis Star Tribune with the details of Blockbuster's latest woes in Minnesota:
Facing stiff competition from online movie retailers such as Netflix, Blockbuster said it plans to close 10 Twin Cities-area stores and one in Duluth in the next several months.
The Wayzata store will shut its doors at the end of January. Apple Valley, Cottage Grove, Columbia Heights and Eden Prairie are scheduled to close in mid-February. Stores in Hudson, Wis., Woodbury, Blaine, Savage, New Hope and Duluth will go out of business in March.
Several of those stores already have stopped renting movies, but are open for sales of CDs and other merchandise.
The company, based in the Dallas suburb of McKinney, Texas, wouldn't discuss details but said its stores can close for various reasons, including the loss of a lease and issues with the size of a store. Blockbuster went into bankruptcy in 2010 and was purchased in 2011 by Dish Network Corp., which now operates Blockbuster as a subsidiary.
Seven Minnesota stores will remain after the closings, said Blockbuster spokesperson Kelsey Smith. Those include stores in Bloomington, Rosemount, West St. Paul, Minneapolis, Edina, Cloquet and Mountain Iron.
Not long ago, Blockbuster and other movie rental companies were ubiquitous, but the digital age is allowing consumers to access movies and games in many other ways, including online, through cable providers and via subscription.
You gotta love that weaselly answer about stores closing for "various reasons." There is only one reason a national chain closes a store location: it isn't making enough money to cover the rent, employee salaries and other expenses. So many Blockbuster locations have closed around my area that I couldn't tell you where the nearest one is anymore. It is long past time for Blockbuster to concede to reality and put itself out of its own misery.
