What You Need to Know Now…

Brother, Can You Spare A Job?
There soon will be more Motorola Mobility staffers filing for unemployment, with some 1,200 emails just sent to employees in U.S., Chinese and Indian offices. These layoffs are in addition to 4,000 job losses at the Google-owned company in August 2012, just three months after the search engine’s acquisition of the handset maker. Google was rated Number One on the 2012 Fortune “Best 100 Companies To Work For” list, but it didn’t make the “No Layoffs” breakout. Google cites high costs, non-competitive markets and a bleeding bottom line for its decision, And now that the Justice Department has approved the T-Mobile USA/MetroPCS merger by letting the antitrust-objections deadline pass (although other regulatory and legislative vetting still is on tap), rumors abound of  “significant layoffs” at T-Mobile even before the deal officially is approved (expected as early as April 12). Yankee Group Senior Analyst Rich Karpinski called the expected RIFs “more ‘business as usual’ than a pure result of the would-be merger. And for T-Mobile, business as usual these days mean executing an ‘uncarrier’ strategy that involves much larger doses of prepaid contracts and value pricing… that will by any measure will shrink top-line revenue and force T-Mobile to run its operations closer to the bone.”