Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Breakdown: Dispatches from the Front
this morning’s viagra memo on the mass layoffs from houghton mifflin harcourt prompted an employee in orlando who survived the cuts to share another where one is coming from, interpreting the events of the last few days as a needed wake up call: “we’ve lived a life of excess, squandering budgets, contracting friends, and pursuing the [1950s] sitcom lifestyle,” this person, who claims more than two decades’ experience in the publishing world, argues. “but over the past decade, the world has changed. the way we do business has changed. the need for lean, mean, printing machines is life-and-death… we need the justice that the imaginative leadership at hmh is bringing us. we continually asked for the truth and now are having a hard control dealing with it. we had these basic every thirteen weeks meetings here at harcourt with the president. lots of fanfare, a half day off, ice cream and lunch. it was great… but would have been better if what we were told was the truth and save the ice cream.”
Not so fast: “It’s been a real disappointment over the past year or so to hear about how things will change positively, but only see… a scrambling and more mismanagement,” a former HMH employee writes. “Four-five lay-offs in the one year is horrendous, even with the current economic situation… Getting rid of talented, experienced, devoted employees who actually do the work to bring a book to press is not a good choice in the long-term from my perspective.” (On that note, it has been suggested to us, though unconfirmed, that the entire production department at HMH’s Lewisville offices was let go.)
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Meanwhile, at HMH’s Austin outpost, another survivor emails us a grim tale…
continued…
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