The merger is an absolute disaster for US employees. While US employees are more productive than their German counterparts, it's much more costly and difficult to layoff in Europe vs the US. The entire US engineering organization and much of the core R&D functions are reporting up through Germany now. While legacy Praxair operations and engineering were always in close communication this is not the case with legacy Linde. Therefore, the German engineering organization believes their designs are much more efficient than they really are. They don't see, or learn from, the consequences of poor designs. However, management has neither the intellect nor desire to dig deep enough to uncover this. Unfortunately, with Germans in charge, US engineering will take the hit. This is the same on the R&D side, particularly in areas like Hydrogen where Linde has been developing syngas technology far longer than their US counterparts. Expecting layoffs in the US technology center in late 2019 or early-mid 2020.
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Your comment is right on. Staff reductions is in CorporateIT, I am the one who was cut off 2 weeks ago.
Layoffs started this week in R&D, more to come.
Your comment is right on. Staff reductions in cost centers such as engineering & R&D are highly likely in order to realize cost reductions in the merged organization. Legacy PX will almost certainly take a big hit. Unfortunate because these PX departments are very cost effective.