Language of losing your job

George Carlin had it right. We use language to hide things, soften the blow of what we should be really facing. In reading the results of Cisco’s Q2 results, it seemed their PR people have come up with more ways to say, “Dude, your unemployed.”

I was without a job for awhile and no spin or term can change the fact that my primary source of income wasn’t there. It was nice not having a boss, but I still have to answer to the overseer that is my wife. (Hi dear!)

The article from Infoworld seemed to have the most $1 (inflation adjusted) terms.

When I was in the middle of the big layoffs of 2001, the term used then was:

RIF - Reduction In Force

Or “Downsizing”. Best one then was “The employee will be in transition”, as if you are being transfered to a better place.

But now, Cisco has some good ones:

A “realignment and restructuring of resources” will result in 2000 jobs lost. But it isn’t a layoff. Last quarter the article states the company realigned 1000 jobs. But it isn’t a layoff.

Quote from John Chambers:
“We are not planning across the board workforce reductions,” he told analysts on the call. “We are not going to consider a layoff at this time. We may be able to avoid large scale downsizing events,” he said.

What is a large scale downsizing event? How is that different than a layoff, workforce reduction, or just plain old job cuts?

I don’t like flowery language in my corporate messages. Good in poems, satire and other things that don’t take themselves too seriously. I pick on Cisco for it has the latest quarterly results and their PR is usually pretty inventive. But I think other companies will be using similar language to mask the fact that global rightsizing (<-- spellchecked!) is just cutting down the number of people employed.

Now that we have all the doom and gloom words out of the way, there isn’t much you can do to punch up “You’re Hired!”. We need to come up with bigger words for job creation. Or just simply call a spade a spade, and get back to implementing ideas to employ those that have found themselves without a job.

-Mike M.