Though Jennings' group of productive companies may not make use of lay-offs, those that have done so recently appear to perform no worse than the market. According to news reports, 38 publicly traded companies based in the US all made more than 1,000 lay-offs in the fourth quarter of 2001. Between January of this year and last week, their share prices dropped by 22 percent on average -- exactly the same loss suffered by the Standard & Poor's 500 index.
In some industries, making job cuts is not a choice. More airlines and telecommunications companies, faced with a steep drop in demand, might have failed if not for hundreds of thousands of lay-offs in the past two years. And for many companies outside those hard-hit industries, cutting jobs has always been an important component of strategic change.
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