urbanSTL

Can attest to the construction job losses, my attempts to get out of my niche job for a small contractor in the dredging business over to general contracting has not gotten me anywhere in St. Louis. In part, my own fault for not pursuing work a few years ago during the building boom in Chicago when I went to graduate school there (too busy chasing a girl in St. Louis and school) or establishing any good networks here once I moved (married the girl from St. Louie). Even government jobs are limited for this area since work is limited to a few big projects rather then a steady stream of infrastructure projects.



Instead, I have gotten offers from Jacksonville, FL, Chicago and San Fran. in the same field. I believe Missouri is starting to realize that job creation is paramount. Maybe it will even realize that a certain amount of smart investment in infrasctructure is needed. That is certainly not truck only lanes in the middle of the state.

ouch



Pfizer Inc. announced today its plans to slash 600 jobs from the drugmaker's 1,000-person workforce in the St. Louis area, part of a global cost-cutting crackdown in its research and development efforts.





http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/busine ... enDocument

^

Fudge.

I'd like to learn more about what Monsanto plans to do with all this space. Will they expanding or is this just more musical chairs?

Pfizer says it will sell the entire 1.3-million-square-foot research center to Creve Coeur-based Monsanto for $435 million. Monsanto already has a sizable, if low-key presence at the center, with 250 labs and two acres of roof greenhouse space. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

that is brutal...There were talks that Monsanto was looking to upgrade their facilities and possibly build a new HQ. I wonder if this delays or eliminates those plans...

This is why you want to be a headquarters town. These guys buy up places to make more money, but the first time the honchos in the headquarter screw-up and have a downturn, their solution is always cut the out-of-town operations they just bought. This way they won't have to face the layed-off people at church.

At least STL is not one of the six sites that have been shut down completely.

Gary Kreie wrote:This is why you want to be a headquarters town. These guys buy up places to make more money, but the first time the honchos in the headquarter screw-up and have a downturn, their solution is always cut the out-of-town operations they just bought. This way they won't have to face the layed-off people at church.

Exactly. Pfizer has a notorious track record in this regard. Over the past decade or so, they've successively acquired a number of established pharmaceutical companies which were still in pretty good shape at the time of the merger/takeover, only to shut them down when projected earnings for Pfizer as a whole took a downturn. Typically, such downturns have arisen from highly profitable Pfizer products going off-patent and/or their planned replacements not meeting expectations, but in each case the response has been to close or drastically downsize one or more of the recently acquired "campuses", rather than implement cuts at the core Pfizer facility where the R&D had actually come up short....

Wow. An entire decade with a net loss of jobs. Now, do you suppose anyone is evaluating the performance of the organizations charged with bringing jobs and commerce to the area? Wouldn't it behoove the board of such an organization to at least consider a change in direction?

^ Maybe we need a bigger convention hotel.