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Dow Chemical: National Employee Morale Day with 2,400 Fired

National Employee Morale Day came to Dow Chemical Co. (NYSE: DOW) as it fired 2,400 people and closed 20 factories. America’s large industrial sector, which appeared to be on the mend earlier this year clearly has started to struggle due to…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published October 23, 2012, 5:45pm ET · 2 min read

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National Employee Morale Day came to Dow Chemical Co. (NYSE: DOW) as it fired 2,400 people and closed 20 factories. America’s large industrial sector, which appeared to be on the mend earlier this year clearly has started to struggle due to the global slowdown. As the company struggles, its chief has been busy Chairman and CEO Andrew N. Liveris was elected Chairman of The Business Council here at the organization’s fall meeting. Liveris apparently won’t be giving up any of his pay as part of the cost cuts. He made $19.3 million last year.

The firm’s PR management wrote:

The Dow Chemical Company  today announced a restructuring program designed to accelerate cost reduction actions and advance the next stage of the Company’s transformation in the midst of persistently slow macroeconomic growth.

These actions will result in a net reduction of approximately 2,400 positions, or five percent of the global workforce. The restructuring also includes the shutdown of approximately 20 manufacturing facilities. Once fully implemented, these actions are expected to result in approximately $500 million of annual operating cost savings by the end of 2014. The Company will take charges totaling approximately $0.50 – $0.60 per share in the fourth quarter of 2012 for asset impairments and write-offs, severance and other costs related to these measures.

In addition, Dow will further reduce capital spending and investments for targeted growth programs that are no longer a priority in this environment. These measures are expected to deliver an additional $500 million cash impact. Taken together with the $1.5 billion of measures Dow has already initiated, this will bring the Company’s stated cumulative intervention goal to $2.5 billion.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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Douglas A. McIntyre

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.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

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.

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