Corporate Executions: The Ugly Truth about Layoffs -- How Corporate Greed Is Shattering Our Lives, Companies, and Communities

Drawing on his experiences as a human-resources consultant, Downs here analyzes the current ``fashionably strategic'' big-business practice: mass firings of employees by companies in a ``culture of corporate narcissism'' seeking lower costs and higher profits. He discusses how layoffs devastate employees' lives, impair ``survivor'' morale and productivity and adversely affect customer relations--without improving materially the firing company's prospects, he maintains. Downs asserts that the average workplace today has become less satisfying, with lower pay and fewer fringe benefits. He advocates reordering work relationships, with workers providing goods and services as professional independent contract (PIC) employees, until ``the majority of workers... come to see themselves as mobile.'' PIC employees would be responsible for their own health care, life insurance and retirement plans. Under this new social contract, corporations would no longer bear the ``parental'' responsibility for their employees. If, as Downs claims, workers stand to gain enormously under such an arrangement, he fails to show how. (Oct.)