Laid-Off Pfizer Researchers Will Get Less Generous Severance - Health Blog - WSJ

By Jonathan D. Rockoff

Pfizer’s announcement of another round of layoffs came as a double blow to many of its researchers, who not only lost their jobs but missed qualifying for a more generous severance package.

For years, Pfizer has been giving laid-off workers three weeks of pay for every year’s service in addition to 13 weeks’ severance. But the company stopped offering that package at the end of last year, leaving the newly fired to receive two weeks’ pay for every year’s service as well as 12 weeks of severance.

Pfizer is cutting as much as 5% of its 110,600-employee workforce as part of a broader restructuring of its research-and-development efforts. Pfizer will close its laboratories in Sandwich, U.K., shift and cut many jobs out of its Groton, Conn., R&D site and abandon in-house work in urology, allergies and other areas.

New CEO Ian Read told reporters yesterday that he wants to focus on the company’s “core competencies” and locate scientists in hotbeds of life sciences research, such as Boston, San Francisco and Shanghai.

The decision to go ahead with layoffs was difficult, Read said, but Pfizer can no longer afford to spend on research in areas where it doesn’t face good odds of finding new medicines and helping patients, or where it could hire outsiders to do the work more expertly and at a lower cost.

Pfizer needs to stop “always investing on hope, rather than strong signals and the quality of the science, the quality of the medicine,” he said.

Current and former Pfizer employees told the Health Blog today that they found the timing of the latest round of cuts curious, given its proximity to the expiration of the more generous severance package.

But the company says the timing had nothing to do with the expiration of the old package.

Pfizer told employees in 2009 that it would end the more expansive severance package at the end of 2010, and the company provided details of its new package last July, a company spokeswoman says. Employees who joined Pfizer from Wyeth qualify for a different package, which doesn’t expire until October.

“Pfizer is committed to treating all colleagues affected by this announcement with the utmost respect.  We believe that the severance package that will be offered to impacted colleagues is a generous and competitive package and provides a broad array of benefits to assist colleagues in their transition to a new opportunity,” the Pfizer spokeswoman said in a statement.

Photo: Associated Press

via blogs.wsj.com

Posted via email from Jack's posterous