商务沟通教学（东北财经大学）Weymouth Steel Corporation.docVIP

Weymouth Steel Corporation In early September of 2004, Weymouth Steel Corporation found itself with both good news and bad news to communicate to its salaried employees. The good news would affect all salaried employees, the bad news only some. When Chairman of the Board Carl Weymouth and his staff discussed the matter, they realized that they faced a familiar but difficult task in corporate communication—a task, moreover, that seemed to encourage reappraisal of some of Weymouth’s traditional approaches to employee communication. GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS The good news was that nearly all salaried employees would be receiving salary increases and improved benefits. Provisions for retirement, vacations, medical and dental care, life insurance, and stock ownership were liberalized or improved in a variety of ways. Ordinarily, such changes were communicated to employees through personnel bulletins and regular issues of the appropriate Weymouth publications—Metal News for salaried employees, The Open Hearth for hourly employees. The bad news was that the company anticipated that it would have to terminate a sizable number of its employees—salaried as well as hourly. Long recognized as a highly cyclical business, the steel industry was enduring a long-term slump due largely to stiff competition from overseas companies. In the next eight months, Weymouth’s business was likely to fall off 25%. At the same time, a variety of forces intensified the company’s need for capital. To become more competitive with European and Japanese firms, Weymouth needed to purchase and install new processing machines and to construct state-of-the-art rolling and hot-strip mills. In addition, their plants needed to satisfy federal anti-pollution standards. During the next five years, capital spending was expected to average $2 billion a year. Therefore, all areas of the company urgently needed to reduce costs. In recent years, Weymouth had initiated several major cost-cutting measures. They shut