Joyce says, "A statistic I've seen is that we've lost 3 million jobs in
the past five years to downsizing. If that represented 10% of the
workforce of those organizations, that means that 30 million people were
affected."
I feel a lot of concern about downsizing, but the employment statistics do
not really support this. The reality is that even more than 3 million
jobs were created in the last five years, and as a result, unemployment is
now at fairly low levels. In fact, American unemployment is lower than
almost all the other developed nations, excluding only Switzerland and
Japan.
The population of middle managers -- primary victims of downsizing -- is
essentiaLy unchanged over the last 10 years. Unemployment among middle
managers is very low -- around 2%. Therefore, one could argue that
downsizing has freed up middle managers for work that is more productive,
and therefore has contributed to the current economic growth patterns.
-- Rol Fessenden LL Bean 76234.3636@compuserve.com -Info: learning-org-approval@world.std.com or <http://world.std.com/~lo/>