The slowing economy...

There's no doubt they use fear and threats as weapons - and they have the ultimate WMD, which is that they control all the information about markets, forecasts, etc. They can make the data say whatever they want, and they can draw whatever conclusions they want from it. When we went into a near-depression, they cut people; now that we're getting out, many of the same corporations are still cutting people. Alcoa cut 37,000+ jobs in the recession, and now that they're profitable, their stated aim is to cut more people.

In a recession, a company can rationally see that as an opportunity to expand because things are cheap and skilled labor is plentiful, or they can cut people to save money. In a recovery they can expand because markets are better or they can cut people because they're unsure of the markets in the future. The same data can be used to do whatever a CEO wanted to do in the first place.

Fair enough - but at least in my experience, smaller companies are the ones that try to hang on to employees as long as they can; large corporations dump them as fast as they can. And things were much different in the 70s when you were with Nabisco. I think the reason for that is smaller businesses are typically run by people who are experts in their craft, and large corporations are run by CEOs who are generic executives and could be running an oil business today and a corn flakes factory the next.

My company is a great example - when I went to work for them in '04, the company was run by the man who founded it, and his employees were like family to him, and in turn all the employees thought of him as "Uncle Pete". Now, our company is a more normal American company, and we have cut very important groups by huge amounts. For example, our group that oversees the operations database (a huge, incredibly complex thing) used to be about 20 people and today it's 3 people. We used to have dozens of engineers that were committed to efficiency analytics and today we have about 5. And today we have a larger physical asset group than we did a few years ago. My company isn't bad to its employees, in fact it's very good, but that's the norm in American corporate life today. It's cut employees first and tell the remainder to figure it out.