The last few weeks have been tough for Ottawa tech mainstay Nortel.
First came the announcement that 1,300 more employees were getting pink slips. Follow that up with an RBC Capital Markets analyst cutting the company’s dwindling stock outlook to zero dollars.
It’s been a long, painful decline for a company that used to have potential employees desparate to get in the door.
Back when I was an intern at the Kingston Whig-Standard, one of my duties was writing the daily “This day in history” type column which involved picking a random year and grabbing the current date from the microfilm archive and looking up what was happening.
I generally gravitated towards stories that were ironic in today’s context and one of those seems even more so now:
There is a black market in Belleville for job application forms. Application forms for Northern Telecom jobs – which were limited to 500 distributed through the Canada Employment Centre recently – are reportedly selling for between $5 and $100.
-from the March 9, 1984 edition of the Kingston Whig-Standard
