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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: L. Adam Latham who wrote (168326)	7/19/2002 5:14:22 AM
From: Amy J	Respond to of 186894

Hi Adam, RE: "HMO - no thanks" Totally agree with you. HMO's aren't much of an option. No thanks. RE: "VSP offer last July, and it certainly wasn't a slow process." That's good to hear it's efficient. Much more humane and more appropriate. I don't think Intel carries any stigma today, that it had in 1990 with NCG's due to the way they did their 80's cuts. VSPs avoid creating such a stigma. Though I still do think that corporations as a whole put more emphasis on, more money on, the transition phase rather then more important longer-term issues like, what do you do with someone who gets cancer after being laid off and their cobra runs out and they're too sick to work. I don't see why companies can't reduce severance a bit, to pay for longer medical health insurance beyond Cobra, especially for those that have something like cancer. My solution would be to borrow a bit of money from the transition phase in order to extend the medical insurance, or even better yet, Congress should enact "portable healthcare" (like there is with Long-Term Care) where you can take it with you. If you have cancer and are too sick to work, your health care just gets cut after Cobra ends, that shouldn't be. RE: "angry employees" People get angry when they aren't told what's up. If a person is told what's up, then they're on your side, even if you are forced to lay them off. When one of my friends got laid off at a startup in the early 90's, before departing he shook all the VPs' hands and told them he wanted to see them turn things around and wished them all the best. He was the first hire they called back when the company turned around. Compare this to another friend of mine, who graduated earlier than I did, she started at Bell Labs sometime in the late 80's. The 80-style layoffs were really disgusting. She told me they put everyone in a large room and literally pointed at people or called out a name. She said, every so often, the caller would make a mistake and say, "Oh, no, sorry, I didn't mean to to call you. You get to stay." And then all those that got laid off had a police escort from their cubes to the front door. And there were so many that got laid off, it took the police escorts all day to get people out, so they apparently had to sit in a room waiting all day long, basically crying, waiting for their turn to get the boot. Really disgusting. No warning either. No way to even get home phone numbers of friends in other departments. I remember she was especially bugged by the fact they didn't even have the consideration to provide the room with a pencil so the folks could write down the names of their friends in the room. As she was leaving the room, someone asked her if she had a pen, she didn't have one, and the person just started crying really hard. Cutting people off from their friends like, without providing a .05 pencil for the room to get each other's numbers, was all the proof we needed when we heard the story as NCG's, that the issue wasn't just a lack of money but downright meanness. Word spread very fast. She was not laid off, but she said she'd never work at Bell Labs again if she ever got laid off. I avoided it too when I graduated after hearing her story. It probably takes 5 years to undo a badly handled layoff. The costs are hidden. Regards, Amy J