Downsizing

Everyone in the company at which I work got an email this morning from the president indicating that there would be an all-company meeting in the mid-morning. Folks are trickling back from it now. The word is that the manufacturing section of the company is moving to the Pacific Rim. Fifty people are going to lose their jobs this summer/fall. And now there's this pall hanging over the place as people wonder what they're going to do next, where they are going to go, and the like. I feel terribly for those folks. I was surprised that the manufacturing arm of the company was here as long as it was. Would this have happened had the company not been bought out by an even larger entity last year? I don't know. I do know that there's a lot of work ahead in transforming the factory floor into an office space.