Big layoffs at Iowa Deere plants
On euphemisms, company towns, and what a 20% decline in sales means to people's paychecks
After issuing a preview warning just over a week ago, John Deere has announced layoffs at three important Iowa locations -- Waterloo, Johnston, and Dubuque. A total of 170 workers are being severed from the company, only weeks after hundreds more were let go from the plants at Waterloo, Dubuque, and Davenport.
■ The company's last annual report looked strong -- sales were up, net income was up, and net equity had grown generously. But John Deere says that it's seeing "a 20 percent decline in sales from 2023 to 2024", and it warned employees at the tail end of May that layoffs were coming.
■ Something structural must be hidden inside the figures; the reported sales figures are down (more dramatically for the latest quarter than for the one before it), but when a company goes well beyond the front-line production floor and gets rid of staff functions, then management is signalling that it thinks hard times are going to stay.
■ "Layoff" remains an undesirable euphemism; it generally tends to suggest that the fault lies with the employer rather than the employee, but that's hardly any comfort to someone stuck looking for a job. And while Waterloo, for instance, isn't exactly the company town it once was (even bigger layoffs in the 1980s saw to that), it's still a place where Deere accounts for 8.4% of all jobs in the county -- even more than the local hospitals, the public schools, or the University of Northern Iowa.
■ If those jobs really aren't coming back anytime soon, what is terrible news today for the laid-off employees and their families also represents an ugly warning to the community at large.
