ESPN Layoffs: Corporate Greed Rears Its Sparkling Head

It appears that Disney has forced sports media giant ESPN to layoff at least 400 employees.

Disney isn’t about to go bankrupt. They rake in millions and millions of dollars, thanks to owning some of the most profitable entities in the world. Disney is everywhere you look, and financial success is always close by. The Marvel superhero movies, the Pixar films, ESPN and ABC television are all huge profit machines, leading Disney to post its highest stock price ever only a few weeks ago.

ESPN itself is a massive money-maker. Half the sports channels on TV are related to ESPN, and new networks covering the SEC and Texas University sports are soon to come. Other numbers related to the company are even more impressive. Recently they announced the construction of a new SportsCenter set which would cost roughly 125 million dollars. They certainly aren’t strapped for cash (unless the people in charge are completely stupid and created the new television programming and ordered the construction of the new set while ESPN lacked the capital to properly fund it all).

So why the layoffs? It appears that ESPN or Disney (or both) understand that these new projects will come at a large cost to the company. Although many of the projects appear to be worth the investment and should give some substantial returns, the short term profits will fall, due to the temporary rise in costs. Unsatisfied with spending even a second without growing profit margins, someone high in the company ordered the layoffs to cut spending and offset the cost of the investments. At least that’s what appears to be happening.

Isn’t this disgusting? The employees at ESPN are hard-working people. They’re honest and decent and kind and all the rest of the bullshit that politicians spout about American people during election season. But, really, they don’t deserve to get fired (unless they do actually deserve to get fired, in which case, they should be fired – but they aren’t being fired, they’re being laid off). And why are they losing their jobs? ESPN isn’t struggling. Neither is Disney. There is no way that argument can be made. They future of those companies looks bright. ESPN has a new SportsCenter set and a bevy new and exciting programming. Disney is in the same position. The Avengers family of films could come out and meet high numbers and the box office until the end of time, and just wait until 2015, when millions of Star Wars films and related paraphernalia smack into America’s collective cultural consciousness.

These entities aren’t in the red. They aren’t losing money or nearing bankruptcy. They’re about to, it seems, experience a tiny blip during which the black number will be smaller than the previous black number on the bottom line. They could wait out that short period and watch profits skyrocket soon after, which they will and everyone knows they will. Instead they’ve chosen to be ruthless, to throw a massive monkey wrench into the lives of around 400 of its hardworking, loyal employees.

That’s capitalism. That’s America. And it’s gross.