
Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and today I read that Citibank is set to lay off 53,000 people, which gives me another thing to be thankful for. I also found on SF Gate the WARN list of layoffs announced. WARN stands for Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, which requires some employers to give 60-days notice for mass layoff or plant shutdown. I am not sure why, but I can remember my layoff from Oracle in October 2003 to be quite sudden, it seemed with out WARNing.
Layoffs tend to happen at the end of the third quarter, when companies are in the mind set of dealing with the annual numbers that will come in the next quarter. This is when companies are likely to cut headcount or have layoffs in anticipation of what’s to come in the next year. It’s not to say that layoffs cannot happen during other times of the year, but it just seems to happen with greater volume between end of 3rd quarter and end of 4th quarter.