WAS IT ONLY TWO YEARS AGO that workers seemed to have all the power? Way back then, with the economy buzzing like a beehive about to issue an IPO on an integrated honeycomb solution, your employees could pick and choose among astounding job offers and demand?and get?wacky perks (onsite pet massages, anyone?). You handed them checks for doing nothing more than sticking around for another quarter. Remember retention bonuses? Weren’t they fun?

Needless to say, those flush times are now a wistful memory. Today, control?if that’s what you want to call hemorrhaging budgets and earnings disappointments?is back firmly in the hands of the employers. And the employers have been laying off folks in droves.

Despite being sensible to the obvious pain felt by those who had lost their jobs, until recently I viewed layoffs with a degree of equanimity, figuring that the thousands sent packing by the likes of Enron, Kmart and Polaroid were, in the long run, better off finding new jobs?no matter how long that took?than they were working for ineptly managed companies.

The closest layoffs had hit to my home was when my brother was sent packing from an investment company following Wall Street’s annus horribilis in 2001. While understandably shocked and dismayed?being called out of a Wednesday morning meeting and escorted to HR by a couple of frozen-faced flunkies was not his idea of a great Humpday?he got over it relatively quickly. Pretty soon he was following up on promising leads and landing interviews. (For one interview, he was whisked off to Scotland for a day, and the grateful Scots sent him a case of champagne as compensation for his trouble. Nice.) He spent half his time networking and job searching, and the other half doing his best Bob Vila impersonation with an overpriced fixer-upper. Within three months, he had a new job and modern plumbing.

Layoff Lessons Learned

It’s tough to put a positive spin on letting people go. Giving employees a one-way ticket off the premises is never pleasant. But it needn’t be cruel either.

When my brother was laid off?along with a couple hundred of his coworkers?it came out of the blue. (Rumor had it that management decided to replace seasoned fund managers like him with fresh-faced MBAs who happened to be a whole lot cheaper.) A 16-year employee with a good performance record, he was treated like a pariah the minute the decision was made to let him go. Besides being publicly summoned to HR out of a meeting, he was watched while he packed up his office (as if, inclined to petty theft, he would not have had ample opportunity over those late nights and long weekends he had put in on the job to pilfer staplers and rubber bands), his voice mail was abruptly disconnected as if he had never existed, and he wasn’t given the chance to say good-bye to his colleagues. Nor were those colleagues who remained told who was let go or why, no doubt filling the survivors’ heads with fear and uncertainty over whose head would be the next to roll. In retrospect, my brother was lucky. He’s moved on to a good job at an untarnished company. His former colleagues remain stuck in a quagmire of sinking morale and pervasive mistrust.