And what would the unions know about business?

All hot air and pontification - complete waste of time and resources.

as someone who works for EDS, an HP company (or whatever our names is now?) - it amazes me how management phrase these things.

the outside world sees 9300 jobs will go

the in-company announcement suggests 9300 jobs will be affected. i.e. they are spinning the bad news.

This always happens with mergers.

Unions know a little bit about business. They know a lot about abuse by corporations of the workers and the environment. Unfortunately, most of the unions today have more in common with the corporations than with the early solidarity and worker protection they were founded on. Maybe workers should band together to protect themselves from both the corporations and the modern "unions"?

I expect HP will be moving many of those jobs to India or China. Fewer protections for workers, more relaxed environmental laws, and more easily corrupted officials makes for better margins and a more profitable business. And we all know that corporations today are all about short-term profit for myopic shareholders, and fuck the workers - as in, those who actually do everything necessary to make those profits - sideways with a rusty chainsaw.

Working in a government institution that pays multi-million euro maintenance contracts to HP every year, I can see them losing much of the share of the contracts for medium to big iron soon.

Here in France, we now get the same people in Tunisia on the phone when we call our so-called "dedicated" support numbers as Joe Average User who just bought a Deskjet printer gets to talk to when he wants to know how to put the ink cartridges in.

I suspect they're picking them up off the streets of Tunis and figure out they'd let them make some first level of diagnosis. When I call for an issue on my ESX cluster running on a farm of blades with SAN connectivity and they ask me "what version of Windows are you running ?" I find it hard not to lose my temper.

HP, continue treating your big account customers like this and they'll turn their backs to you. They've already started to, anyway.

Sorry but Unions are not in sync with today's economy.

Outside of that, HP/EDS is shedding jobs but its a pretty good bet that they will create new jobs too. Care to guess what countries that will be? And of course they'll offshore/onshore the workers to the UK or the US.

The sooner that they understand that "at will" employment works better for everyone, and allows proper staffing levels (good and bad).

Of course, being unemployed since Sept 5 makes this difficult to say, but it needs to be said.

P.S. Have keyboard, will code. Wire Herby, Silicon Valley.

Given what I understand of the EDS market area, I'm fascinated that the European Metalworkers’ Federation is one of the unions objecting. I know servers are sometimes known as big iron, but still...

To El Reg: May I suggest a new entry for the Lexicon Registeria, namely:

herdcount: (noun) a collection of people who, to misquote Shakespeare, are soon "from their jobs to be untimely ripped". Also "herdcounted" (verb) - to be removed from one's job, not because of incompetence, but purely to please those short-sighted bozo's on Wall St.

As you can guess, I figure on probably being herdcounted sometime soon...

@Mergers: sorry to disagree, HP bought EDS, so that surely makes this a takeover. Don't fall for the spin about a "meeting of equals" and similar tripe.

@Unions?? Pah!: Despite having been victim of one of the useless management-lackey unions in the past, I've got to say that - so far at least - the HP/EDS unions have been doing a far better job of looking after the staff than the management are. (Note to self: I really must get around to joining soon)

@Ian Michael Gumby: Sorry IMG, I think you've got that backwards! I'm pretty damned sure that jobs will be moved FROM 1st world locations to wherever they can find a barely-literate, but oh so cheap, workforce. I bet there's black helicopters (hence the icon) circling the globe at this minute looking for isolated rainforest tribes that could form the core of a new "facilitation centre". (grin)

Still, maybe it's a good time to be in HP sales - apparently your numbers are going to grow. Just don't ask who's going to "deliver" all that lovely new work you're going to win! ;-)

I'd love to be proved wrong and end up working for a "better" HP, (and the odd bonus/payrise wouldn't go amiss), but that's as likely as a lottery win I think.

They can't have EDS making the rest of HP look as bad as they really are, so they're reducing customer service to the lowest common denominator.

6 years ago our HP purchases ran to around 10 million pounds annually, but thanks to appalling tech support and poor quality gear (ESPECIALLY PRINTERS) we've been moving that spend elsewhere.

Ever since the HP/Compaq "merger" things have gone downhill badly for _both_ former companies.

9300 layoffs is the tip of the iceberg if this keeps up.

We used to say "Noone here ever got fired for buying HP" but quite a few managers have been hauled over the coals for doing just that and having the products be unfit for purpose...

Tombstone for all the jobs axed - and the ones to be axed.

As a victim of one of EDS's previous reduction exercises, I was the victim of a particularly nasty get out where they use a Compromise Agreement where they have no evidence to get rid of you but a personality wants shot of you. Despite years of loyal performance and service. And there is not a thing you can legally do about it.