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SunTrust Banks Inc. is shuttering its fraud-response call center group in Orlando and shedding more than 100 jobs, the bank confirmed Wednesday. Atlanta-based SunTrust, the largest bank in Central Florida, handed out pink slips to 105 employees on Tuesday. The effective layoff date is Oct. 31, according to documents filed with the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity. "Difficult decisions must be made to increase operational efficiencies and decrease expenses to better position the company for the future," SunTrust told employees in the layoff notice. The bank posted a $400 million profit on revenue of $2.2 billion in the second quarter,...

Boca Raton-based Office Depot said Tuesday it would close 165 stores during 2014 — up from the 150 estimated earlier this year — but stuck with a total count of 400 store closures through 2016, the company said. The office-supply retailer, which merged with OfficeMax last year in a $1.2 billion transaction, said it has completed its analysis of which stores will be closed across the U.S. and Canada. Locally, the retailer has closed two OfficeMax stores, in Coral Springs and Deerfield Beach. The company also announced on a conference call following its second-quarter earnings announcement that it has settled...

Hostess Brands LLC announced on Aug. 20 that the Illinois bakery where Twinkies were first invented will close this fall. More than 400 workers will be affected by the shuttering of the company’s Schiller Park location in October. Sadly, this isn’t surprising. In 2012, Hostess closed three bakeries nationwide after a massive union strike, high labor costs and increased competition turned up the heat on the baked-goods company. It’s hard to believe that some variation of these factors didn’t cause Hostess to sever its ties with Illinois. About 280 of the company’s workers in Schiller Park voted to unionize in...

They’ve turned to politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen and union reps to try to save their jobs at three Atlantic City casinos scheduled to close soon. Now, hundreds of soon-to-be unemployed dealers, cocktail servers and hotel workers are turning to what many say could be their last, best chance. “We’re praying for God to open new doors to them,” said Rev Eric McCoy, president of the Atlantic City Fellowship of Churches. Clergy members and the main casino workers union organized a rally and prayer service Wednesday night for the nearly 8,000 workers who will be jobless when Revel, the Showboat and Trump...

SAN FRANCISCO — Cisco Systems may be doing a little better than Wall Street expects, considering its technology and sales challenges. But that doesn’t mean the company will avoid layoffs in the coming months. On Wednesday, Cisco released fourth-quarter earnings that illustrated its troubles as one of the tech industry’s giants competing in a rapidly changing environment. Fourth-quarter revenues, Cisco said, were $12.36 billion, down from $12.42 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Net income was $2.25 billion, or 43 cents a share, down from $2.27 billion a year ago. Using nonstandard accounting common to many tech companies,...

Cisco reports its fourth quarter earnings on Wednesday, and rumors have begun circulating that another round of layoffs are coming, maybe announced next week, maybe in October. We can’t confirm those rumors, which stem from an anonymous source who tipped off Cisco blogger Brad Reese. But a source did tell us that Cisco is working on a reorganization of some of its engineering teams. Reese broke the news on last year’s surprise layoffs which also came from an anonymous tip. Last August, Cisco shocked the world by reporting a better-than-expected quarter, and a solid year, and that it was still...

Employees on Wall Street, and those working at other financial institutions, are concerned about keeping their jobs. But a recent survey showed that financial services companies may underrate the value employees put on job security. This comes as the threat of layoffs is seen at many top banks. For instance, JPMorgan is laying off hundreds of tech-support workers, and the Bank of America is letting staff go, too, as well as Citigroup and Bank of New York Mellon. Laura Sejen, a managing director at Towers Watson, which released the recent survey, told eFinancialCareers, “US employees working in financial services indicate...

Layoffs in the technology sector could reach their highest level in five years, according to a group that tracks employments trends. So far this year, tech employers have announced plans to cut payrolls by 48,402, a 68 percent increase over the 28,883 layoffs announced during the same period in 2013, according to a special report released Monday by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. At the current rate, the 2014 year-end total could be the highest since 2009, when tech-sector job cuts hit 174,629. The highest total on record was 695,581 job cuts in 2001, when the tech bubble in the stock...

NORRISTOWN, Pa. (CBS) — A major pharmaceutical company is planning another round of layoffs that again will hit Montgomery County hard. On the heels of more than 650 job cuts at its West Point manufacturing and research plant in late 2013 and earlier this year, Merck plans to let go another 600 employees by the end of August. The company has already filed notices with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor which says the jobs are being cut in North Wales and Lansdale. County Commissioner Josh Shapiro is disappointed with the news, but says they’re working to help those affected.

Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT ) recent announcement that it will cut 18,000 jobs was much higher than anyone expected. It's the company's largest layoff by headcount since it laid off 5,800 employees in the midst of America's Great Recession back in 2009. Microsoft isn't the only one to make such striking job cuts. Global pharmaceutical company Merck (NYSE: MRK ) is in the middle of a two-year plan to reduce its workforce by about 20% -- which equates to about 16,000 employees. At the end of it all, the company expects this to contribute substantially to its goal of saving $2.5...

On Thursday, Microsoft announced it would cut 18,000 jobs (14% of the company workforce) in the next year, the largest reduction in company history. Since its acquisition of Nokia, experts predicted there would be some layoffs, but the number is double the amount predicted. Stephen Elop, head of Microsoft’s device unit (the hardest hit by the layoffs) and former CEO of Nokia, proceeded to bury the news about 12,500 layoffs in the eleventh paragraph of a corporate memo. Elop begins the memo with a cheery “Hello there,” stating Microsoft’s strategy is “focused on productivity and our desire to help people...

One of the top 10 employers in Flagstaff, Walgreens, announced Friday that it was closing its distribution center by April and laying off all 345 employees. ... Walgreens recently announced it was seeking to relocate its corporate headquarters overseas to lower its income tax bill. One estimate put first-year tax savings for the country’s largest drugstore chain at more than $700 million. The Wall Street Journal reported July 15 that Walgreens is considering buying the rest of Alliance Boots, a drugstore chain that operates in the United Kingdom but is headquartered in Switzerland. If Walgreens does purchase the rest of...

Kgb USA Inc. has informed the Texas Workforce Commission that it plans to carry out a “mass layoff” in San Antonio. The call center company, which does business as Conduit Global, expects to eliminate 225 positions by Aug. 31. Conduit Global officials say the layoffs are a result of an unexpected cancellation of services by one of the company’s clients. Conduit Global notes in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) letter filed with the Texas Workforce Commission that it is hopeful the layoffs can be minimized by the “potential award of a large customer care contract.” If a...

Piketon , Ohio - Roughly 1400 people woke up to bad news Thursday morning. It's called a warn notice, and it means their livelihood is on the line. "These are the higher paying jobs in the area," Herman Potter said. But those jobs are now in jeopardy. Herman Potter is president of the Steel Workers Union in Piketon, Ohio. His employer, Fluor B&W issued a warn notice, stating layoffs are possible. Fluor B&W was hired by the Department of Energy to clean the former Portsmouth gaseous diffusion plant and re-industrialize the property three years ago. The way things stand now,...

Employees at Dell Services offices in Plano will be affected by global layoffs that parent company Dell Inc. is undergoing, but the number of pink slips the Round Rock-based tech giant will pass out in North Texas is not yet clear. Dell workers were to be notified Wednesday of layoffs across the globe, including at Dell Services offices in Plano. A statement put out by Dell confirmed the layoffs but declined to give the number of workers that the computer firm will cut. Dell has about 2,500 employees in North Texas and about 16,500 statewide.

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp will slash up to 18,000 jobs, or 14 percent of its workforce, this year as it almost halves the size of its newly acquired Nokia phone business and tries to transform into a cloud-computing and mobile-friendly software company. The larger-than-expected cuts, announced on Thursday, are the deepest in the company's 39-year history and come five months into the tenure of Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella. He outlined plans for a "leaner" business in a public memo to employees last week.

SEATTLE — Microsoft said Thursday that it planned to eliminate up to 18,000 jobs over the next year in a shake-up intended to help the company move more quickly in the market. The cuts are the largest in the company’s 39-year history, representing about 14 percent of its work force. Microsoft will make the deepest cuts from the businesses it acquired from the Finnish phone maker Nokia. About 12,500 of the jobs being eliminated will come from the Nokia groups, resulting from the closing of a factory in Hungary and other changes. That is about half the number of employees...

The action will be much bigger than the 5,800 job cuts announced in 2009, The New York Times said. Microsoft reportedly will announce the biggest round of layoffs in its history on Thursday as massive changes wrought by new CEO Satya Nadella start to take hold at the struggling IT giant.

By now, everyone knows that Hillary Clinton’s memoir Hard Choices is a disaster of such enormous political and financial proportions that it should have been titled “Heaven’s Gate” — a reference to the most infamous Hollywood box office bomb of all time. So how are Bill and Hillary taking this depressing news? And what, if anything, are they planning to do about it? For an answer, I spoke to two sources — one in Bill’s inner circle, the other in Hillaryland (as Hillary’s court is called) — and although these two sources do not know each other, they confirmed the...

First quarter sales in 2014 fell 11% at Simon & Schuster, to $153 million, but operating income rose to $11 million from $10 million in the first quarter of 2013, parent company CBS reported. -snip- And then there is the new Hillary Clinton book due out in the middle of June. "It's a great book," Reidy said, adding that she hopes Hard Choices will drive consumers into stores. Perhaps with the promotion planned for the Clinton book on her mind, Reidy said she is sure marketing costs, and sales, will be higher for the rest of the year than in...