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Even as layoffs are reaching historic levels, more employers bring forth mould an alternative to slashing their work force. They’re nipping and tucking it instead.

A growing digit of employers

The rolls of companies nipping at labor costs through measures less powerful than wholesale layoffs include Dell (extended unpaid celebration), Cisco (four-day year-end shutdown), Motorola (pay cuts), Nevada casinos (four-day workweek), Honda (voluntary owing vacation time) and The Seattle Times (plans to save money with a week of unpaid furlough toward nonunion workers). There are also numerous midsize and small companies trying such tactics.

The reasons behind the steps

Companies taking nips and tucks allege this economy plunged so quickly in October that they do not want to prune too much, should it equitable as suddenly roar back. They also say they have been so careful about hiring and spending in recent years that highly productive workers, not slackers, remain on the payroll.

At more companies, employees are supporting the tortuous wage cuts

Companies seem particularly determined to find alternatives to layoffs in this recession, said Jennifer Chatman, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. “Organizations are trying to cut costs in the name of avoiding layoffs,” she related. “It’s not just that organizations are remark ‘we’re cutting costs,’ they’re saying: ‘we’re doing this to keep from loss people.’ “

She said the tactic builds long-term fidelity among workers who are not laid off and spares the concourse having to compete again to hire and body of attendants anew.

The magnanimous feeling determination probably be sanctioned by a majority of votes, said Truman Bewley, an economics professor at Yale who has studied what happens to compensation during a recession. If the sacrifices look as though they are going to continue by reason of many months, he reported, some workers will be augmented frustrated, want their full compensation back and may well prefer a layoff that creates a new permanence.

“These are feel-good, temporary measures,” he said.

But John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a company that tracks layoffs, said employers were being driven now not through compassion however by hard calculations based on data they have never had before. More than aye, he reported, companies have used technology to path employee performance and productivity, and in many cases they know the workers they would cut are productive ones.

“People are measured and ‘metricked’ to a much greater quality,” he said. “So companies be sure that when they’re cutting an already taut organization, they’re leaving big gaps in the work force.”

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008547505_layoffs22.html?syndication=rss