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Viacom Datapoint Of The Day

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by Felix Salmon
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Dec 04 2008 9:20am EDT

Viacom Datapoint of the Day

Viacom's announcing that it's cutting 850 jobs, or 7% of its workforce, at a cost of between $400 million and $450 million. Which, if you do the math, works out at about half a million dollars per job reduction.

You think that's mostly the writedowns of "certain programming and other assets"? I'm not so sure, after bumping into my neighbor yesterday, who had a massive grin on his face after walking into Viacom HR and walking out with a severance package of 24 months' pay. If that offer's extended to Viacom employees generally, they might well find themselves with a too-many-voluntary-redundancies problem.

(HT: Wiesenthal)

Update: Viacom spokesman Jeremy Zweig just sent me a note saying that "the significant majority of the charge mentioned in the release is related to the asset writedown, not severance".

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