Aetna To Layoff 1,000

This is sad news, but what else can you say? Let's all hope and pray that once this economic slowdown is over,(and yes, this too shall pass) that we'll be hearing about companies hiring folk back by bunches. And also, 3 percent? That's a whole lot better than most companies have had to let go.

the whole company is goimg to shit they have no value. 1000 is not the end

This is not necessary. This is managing to wall street expectations and trying to keep stock prices up so the senior managers can keep their stock options going. In this economy, it should be a company's patriotic duty to absorb some losses, pay for them out of the billions in cash reserves that all major corporations have been amassing during the last few years and keep people employed no matter what the cost. If this keeps up we will see CEO's driving their Mercedes past everyone else in a 1930's depression-era breadline.

Rest assured folks, Ron Williams will get his million dollar plus bonus and Aetna will continue to jack up the health care costs on it's own employees. There used to be a sense of pride working at "mother Aetna", now it's just another sh**ty office job!

Lets just hope no executives had to share the pain, let the little people go.

PS. I feel awful about George David. He should have just hired a Polish Girl and kicked her to the curb when she turned 30.

I was just wondering about the poll attached to this article. Where is the "already laid-off" response?

I head Aetna is hiring in India. Does anyone speak Punjabi or Bengali?

Aetna expects workers to put in 50+ hours of salaried work per week, and still thinks nothing of laying off the American worker, while keeping on well over 50% of the IT workforce of Indian consultants. And, yes, Ron Williams will take a huge bonus for making these cost cutting efforts.

It is true that Aetna lays off Americans and brings workers from India who are willing to work more hours and for less wages--and I have a friend who actually had to train the person from India who eventually replaced him.

Aetna is a great old Connecticut company, it is too bad they have reached this point. This is an especially hard time to be laid off, an economy in the dumps and at Christmas.

Now is the time, for all the Aetna employees to stand up and say, no more jobs to India..........

Town and State employees have unions..........

Anyone who's been at Aetna's Middletown complex can attest that it feels like you're in the middle of Bangalore!

When is this once great country going to start taking care of Americans first???

Not a single American citizen should be laid off while there are countless Indian, Chinese and other H1B visa holder roaming the hallways.

Congress can fix this problem real quick if they enact a law that bans executive bonuses for any company that lays off more than 100 American workers in a single year. If this were to happen, you can bet your bottom dollar they'd find another way of implementing cost savings, like perhaps sending all the H1B visa holders packing!

Ron Williams took $40 Million in comp last year, the previous year $30 Million. Williams also cashed out around $30 Million of his Aetna stock last year, while it was still up there, he obviously must think or knew Aetna's on the decline. Maybe he's getting ready to jump ship before it sinks. This info is in public filings.

Williams also has taken away huge benefits from the employees. Such as taking away a good pension, taking all medical benefits away from retirees. He took away the jobs from the cleaning ppl and the cafe workers, etc., and then outsourced it so any of them left got a low pay and no benefits, no pension, etc. Aetna calls it being "competitive." I think it is called "disgusting."

This is if you are lucky enough to have a job...

Looong gone is "mother" Aetna.

I hope the people in Connecticut who are talking about health care "reform" remember that we have thousands of jobs at stake in that debate....

I don't work for Aetna but I thought I just heard yesterday that they have been keeping their heads above water despite the economic down turn and that they expect to hit their 4th quarter projections?

ConcernedInsuranceWorker wrote:

I hope the people in Connecticut who are talking about health care "reform" remember that we have thousands of jobs at stake in that debate....

If there is no health care reform, this country will go bankrupt. A few thousand jobs are worth the sacrifice and the end result for local insurance companies would most likely be a shift from a payer role to that of plan administrator, which would still require many employees.

Having said that, I think that the days of gross profits for insurers are numbered.

A bigger problem is the continued erosion of the middle class, by sending countless jobs overseas to enemy states, where the employees will most likely never become consumers of our products and services.

Missing Mother Aetna wrote:

Ron Williams took $40 Million in comp last year, the previous year $30 Million. Williams also cashed out around $30 Million of his Aetna stock last year, while it was still up there, he obviously must think or knew Aetna's on the decline. Maybe he's getting ready to jump ship before it sinks. This info is in public filings.
Williams also has taken away huge benefits from the employees. Such as taking away a good pension, taking all medical benefits away from retirees. He took away the jobs from the cleaning ppl and the cafe workers, etc., and then outsourced it so any of them left got a low pay and no benefits, no pension, etc. Aetna calls it being "competitive." I think it is called "disgusting."
This is if you are lucky enough to have a job...
Looong gone is "mother" Aetna.

yeah and he made them pay for parking in Aetna's owned lots (I was a former ING slave)

I cant believe Aetna had the nerve to charge their employees to park in the Cap Ave Lots. Its in the middle of a war zone. You can catch the bus or risk your life walking. I was so happy when ING got us out of there and brought us to Windsor.

I wonder how many of the 53000 Citibank employees laid off had credit card accounts with Citibank itself? I wonder if it occured to them that they laid off not only their employees, but their customers as well, further damaging debt repayments. All companies should be thinking long and hard about the impact of these supposed "savings" to the bottom line. I am beginning to get very angry about how businesses are behaving at this time.

H1B Visa requires an employer to exhaust a search for and interview American citizen candidates BEFORE hiring the H1B visa. So it's not like any company just hires from outside the country without trying to find the help locally...

And a lot of big insurance agencies (MetLife, etc) have lots of clients in other countries! It's not like the only business in the world is right here in the USA...

And hey- there's a lot of very intelligent workers who aren't American. I recently just hired a new developer position and was having trouble finding decent American citizen candidates who weren't scared off when I asked them to solve a simple Calculus 101 equation.

If you are worried about losing your job, improve your skills! Try harder, learn more, prove your worth. The least valuable get laid off first.