Insane that those chosen for involuntary are still required to work for 60 days. If you’re lucky to not be chosen, how do you interact with those that are? If you are chosen, god bless your heart.
Every company is struggling badly, yet they seem to give much better severances than what we get.
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Oh my, sad sad sad. EM is borrowing money to pay salaries too. And benefits. And they were borrowing money to pay the company match, but they took your advice and quit "giving that away".
Next EM will quit "giving away" even more salaries because they are so overstaffed. And more benefits cuts and salary reductions are coming since employees aren't in any way entitled to these, as you point out these are just more "give aways" that incur debt to meet. And plenty of people standing in line willing to work for much less to relieve you of the terrible burden of making enormous sums of money.
In fact, why even have employees? Just classify everyone as a contractor and hire/fire as needed to avoid any possibility of having them qualify as an employee? That would save tons of money, reduce or eliminate borrowing in this time of record low borrowing rates, and finally get rid of all of these pesky "give aways".
And by all means let's alienate shareholders even more than just losing 60% of share value, let's eliminate the dividend from the rightful owners and encourage them even more to dump EM stock. Brilliant. That allows us to to be debt free with hardly any assets, few workers, and maybe if we are lucky, EM can be delisted from the exchange.
You sir are a financial genius with an inspiring vision. I nominate you to the BOD, of course with no remuneration so we can keep that debt down. As anyone will tell you, the LAST thing you want to do is load up on cheap debt. We can always borrow at much higher rates in a few years, assuming the lights are still on.
Laugh. Paying lots of folks $X00s a year to do something silly is bad business. Borrowing a $1 with interest so you can give it away is bad business.
My skull may be thick, but the former seems easier to defend/spin than the latter. Either way, bad business eventually leads to a reckoning.
Reduce staff, change management, pause the dividend. And yes, for goodness sakes, let the folks who are getting cut leave as close to immediately as possible.
Same old dividend rant again. Just can’t get it thru your thick skulls that dividends do NOT belong to employees. They belong to the OWNERS of the company, aka shareholders.
You are dreaming if you think layoffs would be any less if the company cut or even eliminated the dividend. HQ would just use the money for some other poor investment strategy, which would ultimately lead to more layoffs.
Taking what belongs to others because “I need it more” seems to be the employee battle cry now. How about shareholders demand 20% of all employee salaries as a special shareholder payout to offset stock price losses? Oh, you don’t like that idea now do you?
If only those mean greedy shareholders would do without so we employees can stay grossly over staffed and wasteful, all would be well. Yeah right. Brilliant. You have done so well with the hundreds of billions the shareholders already entrusted to you.
NO more soup for you.
Shouldn't that have been Darth Woodius instead?
Xombies*
ExxonMobil has one of the weakest boards of directors of any major company. They play no role in running the company. They are just a rubber stamp for the management committee. That is probably the worst kept secret in the company. The dividend is a great example. Rather than managing to maximize “long term shareholder value”, they are trying to appease shareholders by compensating them for their 65% loss in stock value by paying an unsustainably high dividend out of non-existent cash flow. Not what I would call a long term strategy for success. They defend it by saying that shareholders rely on the dividend. I guess they don’t think employees rely on their paychecks. Even most executives can’t defend the dividend policy with any conviction, because it makes no sense.
Now there is no doubt about the need to reduce investment and tightly control expenses during this time of difficulty. The companies that do that best will survive and prosper. But slashing good employees and fire-saling good assets to raise cash in a down market is not a plan for long term success.
One of our successful former chairman was fond of saying “we don’t run our business by looking out the window “. The management committee is now looking out the window at shareholders and trying to avoid being booted out of power for gross mismanagement by bribing them with high dividends. But that strategy will only last so long. The day of reckoning is coming.
That's because our shareholders are the owners. They own the company, and run it. So sayeth Lord Woods.