On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 8:05 AM, Vitaliy wrote: >> And the fact we always run lean and mean, it hasn't had an overall impact. This seems to be the same case here. In fact, I would argue it is too lean to do things. We need to support the production, to support more difficult customer issues and carry out new development. > I think going forward our company will be relying more on contracted labor. Outsourcing seems to be the trend. And US companies seem to use a lot of contract labor. It seems not so popular in Asia. Anyway, here the union (except South Korea) is very weak. So it is very easy and not expensive to let go regular employees anyway. TCL and Benq learned the hard lessons when they bought Thomson Multimedia and Siemens Mobile respectively. The labor cost in Europe is prohibitively high and it is very very costly to let go employees in Europe. I tend to agree with many analysts saying that Europe will be much worse off in the Economy downturn than USA. Let's wait and see. Xiaofan -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist