Rental car firm forced to lay off workers

Rental car companies that have managed to avoid layoffs in the past are finding that this economic downturn is requiring more dramatic cost-cutting measures.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car has spoken with pride of its 51-year history without employee layoffs in the U.S. As rivals closed unprofitable outlets and reduced the size of their fleet after the 9/11 terror incidents, Enterprise continued to grow and hire more staff.

In the fall of 2008, however, America’s largest rental car company announced that it would have to lay 1,000 of its 75,000 employees, as travelers in the U.S. further curtailed flying and renting cars. “These types of declines are unprecedented,” noted Patrick Farrell, the vice president for corporate responsibility at Enterprise.

Other long-established employers are finding that the deepening recession is making job cuts necessary. The layoffs underline the severity of the economic climate and the loss of job security that at one time protected so many workers in the U.S. from the fear of losing their jobs.

Several of the employers announcing layoffs are in industries particularly hard hit by the recession. For example, in the car rental and leasing sector, jobs fell by 3.3 percent in October as compared with the same month in 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Gentex Corp., an automotive supplier based in Michigan, announced its first layoffs in 34 years earlier this month as car sales plummeted. In another industry, a decline in revenue from gambling forced the Little River Casino located in Manistee, Michigan to let 100 of its 950 employees go in November. These were the first layoffs in the casino’s nine-years of operation.

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