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198 Managing Customers Through Economic Cycles

These days, such options are less generous, he says, citing
a particular hospital where buyout offers are more typical:
one or two weeks of pay for each year of service. “No one
who is happy in their job and doesn’t have something lined
up would leave for four or eight weeks of pay. But you
might have people who were going to leave anyway, and
see it as a great opportunity.”

The other side of that coin is that some companies make
such offers “only to show employees that they are basically
good people, just before the involuntary layoffs come. Since
the Depression, all these alternatives have been discussed
– to lay people off or share the pain,” O’Meara says, recall-
ing personal experiences as a young man growing up in
western Pennsylvania, where he worked summers in a steel
mill. “There, when things got slow, we all worked four days
a week. That’s [a case] where the union had the effect of
making sure people held on to their jobs. A lot of this stuff
has been around for a long time. These decisions have huge
impacts on people and there are no easy solutions.”

Avoiding layoffs “at all costs”

“The economy has got us all watching very closely. Like
anyone, we are trying to figure out where the bottom is,”
says Tim Roth, president of Megavolt, an agricultural machine
re-manufacturer based in Springfield, Mo. “Agriculture has
been relatively strong compared to other industries, but in
June, we saw that in future months we would have some
problems. We tried to figure out how to keep people and
avoid layoffs at all costs.”

Megavolt has two advantages over many other private
companies. First, it is a joint venture with two other organi-
zations descended from International Harvester after a buyout
25 years ago. In some cases, this allows employees who get