Motorola Plays Pin the Tail on the Employee (MOT)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 28, 2:13AM EDT · Published Dec 17, 9:32AM EST

Mot Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT) may be one of the restructuring nightmares of the decade. This morning the company is taking further steps in its restructuring by announcing "cost cutting measures"…. Another sign that business is booming. Wink, wink.

Motorola said that effective March 1, that it will permanently freeze its U.S. pension plans, preserving vested benefits accrued by employees and retirees but eliminating future benefit accruals.

Effective January 1, 2009 the company will temporarily freeze all company matching funds to employee 401(k) plans.

Employees in many of the markets in which it operates will not receive a salary increase in 2009.

Motorola co-chief executive officers, Greg Brown and Sanjay Jha will take a voluntary 25% decrease in base salary in 2009. Brown is foregoing a bonus, and Jha is taking a reduced bonus under what he is due in his contract. But why, they are doing such a great job.

Motorola said that these cost cuts will add on to the previously announced $800 million in cost savings from October 30. Interestingly enough, it did not offer many details. Motorola executives probably do not even know.

Its been cold as hell in Chicago and Schaumburg. If you work at Motorola, shrinkage is not something that just happens to Seinfeld. If you went to work at Motorola this morning and felt like you sat down on a bunch of thumb tacks, it is because management put those tacks there in the middle of the night.

Jon C. Ogg
December 17, 2008

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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

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A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.