Page 54 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

Crosswind Factors C41

to the unemployment lines, and provoked a governmentwide struggle
to head off a national depression.
The magnitude of this economic challenge can be expressed by a
few sobering facts:

: More than 4.7 million U.S. workers lost their jobs between
November 2008 and June 2009. 10
: At the beginning of 2008, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average
was over 12,400. By February 2009, it had dropped below
7,200, a net loss of over 42 percent. By October, the national
unemployment rate had reached 9.8 percent, the highest in
years. 11
: More than 150,000 layoffs were announced among Ameri-
ca’s 500 largest companies in January 2009 alone, including
cuts by stalwart employers such as Boeing, Starbucks, Target,
Caterpillar, Pfizer, Home Depot, General Motors, Disney,
Xerox, GE, Motorola, Best Buy, Walgreens, and Google.
: By February 2009, one in four American companies had insti-
tuted salary freezes. 12
: Some industries, such as domestic automobiles, were suffer-
ing and nearing collapse. The National Automobile Dealers
Association predicted that roughly 900 of the nation’s 20,770
new-car dealers would go out of business in 2009, and auto-
mobile analysts predicted that the number of failed dealer-
ships would rise into the thousands. 13
: American stores dropped prices, reducing profit margins and
leading to the closure of stores such as Circuit City, Linens
’N Things, and Sharper Image. 14

We knew on the day of the financial meltdown (September 13,
2008) that it was a watershed moment. In most of our lifetimes, and
certainly in the previous five years that Best-Places-to-Work contests
have been held yearly in dozens of U.S. cities, nothing of this magni-
tude had happened. We saw the potential that these concussive events