Ho-Ho-No! Gateway And HP Set Holiday Furloughs

Companies give employees an unpaid week off to save money and boost financials.

InformationWeek Staff, Contributor

December 11, 2002

1 Min Read
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Thousands of employees at Gateway Inc. and Hewlett-Packard will be home for the holidays, whether they want to be or not. They're being furloughed by their companies, which want to save money and improve fourth-quarter financials.

Gateway has notified about 2,500 of its marketing, supply-management, engineering, and product-development employees that they'll be taking off Dec. 24 to 31 without pay. HP will furlough about 140,000 employees worldwide from Dec. 23 to 29. This follows furloughs HP implemented earlier this year to cut costs.

These bah-humbug moves don't bode well for next year, but they're likely to save jobs in the short term, says Rob Enderle, a research fellow at Giga Information Group. "All of Gateway's employees know that it's operating in the red," he says. The furloughs "become a problem when employees have burned up their vacation time and are living paycheck to paycheck."

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