Dotcom Publisher Lays off 25 Percent of US Staff

That was my office news Thursday. I have spent the past few months looking rather bemusedly at my employment status — I missed the startup boom, and for a while, I was missing out on the bust. But even 150-year-old global publications have lilting budgets in this strange year. Mind you, 25 percent is only four employees in my relatively small office, but our team, 20 strong in February, will be down to 12 after Halloween.

Thursday morning a department-wide email told everyone to be available for meetings that afternoon. No specific times or meetings were announced. By 2 p.m. the top two officers of our department had disappeared, and the remaining staff congregated in several small groups, full of nervous laughter and no-longer-hidden consternation.

At 2:30, phones rang and the four staff members disappeared upstairs, bump bump bump bump. The remaining staff clumped together, knowing what was happening, wondering who else would be let go.

I spent this time in an awkward position: As a department director but not a decision-maker, I knew what was going on but was not involved in it. I could neither commiserate with my distraught coworkers nor take a position of superiority and speak to them as a boss. Instead, I spent most of the awkward hour alone at my desk, waiting for my sole employee to get fired, waiting to leave the office early for the dentist appointment I had scheduled.

The phone rang, and word came downstairs. Layoffs were finished, and those still in our main office had been spared. People sighed but were not pleased; when cubicle neighbors get fired, every employee feels the disappointment and the pain.

I left the office around 2:50 and missed the aftermath, including a 3:30 group meeting where the official layoff announcements were made. I phoned my boss around 4:30 and received the low-down: The “redundant” staff are to be considered done with their work, effective immediately, but as a gesture of understanding they would be allowed to use their desks for four weeks to aid in their job searches. We would not be working with these people any longer, but we might still see them at their desks, quietly attempting to find somewhere else to work.

This is business in 2001. We have laid off seven employees in the New York office in eight months in three separate waves. We have merged business development into sponsorships and marketing into advertising. We plod through our tasks, keeping projects moving forward, despite our fears of unemployment, sometimes because of them. Every project we undertake aims squarely at our bottom line, because our bottom line demands it, because the mother ship doesn’t have the wiggle room to toy with a new product, and because there’s no funny money anymore. The lessons we didn’t think we had to learn two years ago we are learning with expediency now.

I still have the good fortune of a good job with a good company working on a good product. Wherever we need to go next, I look forward to helping get us there. I just hope we arrive before more redundancies affect those of us who remain.