The Maven: Lowdown on Layoffs

(Editor's note: To access some of these stories, registration or a subscription may be required. Please check the individual links for the site's policy.)

If you think Wall Street loves layoff announcements, take a look at how the business media greet them. It is an ultimate irony that reporters -- busy whining in their own newsrooms about how the product they produce will break bad if a single hair-care-product columnist is laid off -- do so little critical thinking about layoffs at other companies. There's never a sense that announced cuts often don't materialize ... or do, but at a higher cost, as buyout packages have to be sweetened to find takers.

Worst of all (see, uh, that hair-care columnist), there is never a sense (so vital to the well-being of investors) that cuts have potential costs. That brings us to Business Week -- no stranger to layoffs -- and its decent coverage dealing with layoffs at Pfizer (PFE).

The big ditty on Pfizer concluded the way many articles on the company do not: It discussed how Pfizer will sell drugs in the absence of so many salespeople, whose layoffs have been recently announced.

Mind you, The Business Press Maven is no populist on the subject of layoffs. I understand that redundancies grow over time in workforces and that sometimes the best long-term survival tactic is to get leaner quickly.

Just the same, Business Week did well to look further than others have: the back-of-the-envelope calculations on money saved, fed to them by company officials. More importantly for investors, even assuming that an amount of money near that will actually be saved, who will pick up the workload of the employees thrown overboard and nibbled to death by the sharks?