Yahoo workers protest move to close France centre

Grenoble, Dec 18: Yahoo engineers in France went on a strike on Wednesday, Dec 16, protesting against the CEO Carol Bartz's decision to shut down the R&D centre in Grenoble and lay off 78 engineers.

Mocking Yahoo's 'It's You' campaign, the protesters wrote a post titled Yahoo It Was You on Google-owned blogspot.

Announcing the decision to shut down the centre, which was inaugurated in 2008, Bartz said "Six per cent operating margin is terrible, terrible... We have a commitment that it will be 15 to 20 pc in the next three years."

The company, which implemented rigorous cost cutting and lay offs throughout the year, recorded a 300 per cent profit jump in the third quarter of 2009.

"Yahoo! France collected 208 Millions EUR on the advertising market in 2008. This number must be compared to the number of employees in France: 212," the protesting engineers wrote in the blog post quoting Yacast study.

Substantiating their move to protest against the management's decisions with these figures, the engineers wrote, "French engineers are going on strike today (16th December) to protest against the way Yahoo! is leading this project."

OneIndia News