Harley-Davidson and Cisco both let go of many hundreds.

With its sales of motorcycles down 30% and its revenue down 27% from last year, Harley-Davidson, the legendary producer of high-end hogs, slashed its expectations for this year's shipments by nearly 20% this week and let go of 1,000 workers. This follows the company's January job cut of 1,100, bringing its total staff reduction so far this year to 2,100. The company employs around 9,300 altogether.

Its new chairman and chief executive officer, Keith Wandell, who took charge in May, maintained that Harley's brand is still top-notch, and that the sales slump reflects only the down economy: "It is obviously a very tough environment for us right now, given the continued weak consumer spending in the overall economy for discretionary purchases." Harley's stock price was floating around $18.90 on Friday, down by more than half since last year, but still more than double its low of $7.99 in March.
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Last week Hasan Imam, an analyst with Thomas Weisel Partners, reported that Cisco Systems ( CSCO - news - people ) was preparing for large layoffs. This week Cisco began printing the pink slips. The carnage wasn't quite as gruesome as the 2,000 dismissals Imam had predicted, but Cisco let go of nearly 700 on Thursday at the company's San Jose, Calif., headquarters. John Chambers, Cisco's CEO, said in February that he'd be eliminating up to 2,000 jobs by the end of the fiscal year; these are among those positions. Cisco employs around 66,000 people altogether.

Navistar International, a producer of military vehicles, laid off 275 at its plant in West Point, Miss., this week. The layoffs follow Navistar's failure to win a $1.06 billion Pentagon contract, which was instead awarded to Oshkosh, of Wisconsin. The West Point plant operates on a project-by-project basis, said a spokeswoman for the company. Navistar hopes to find a new vehicle to build to bring the plant back to full operation in the future.

Boeing ( BA - news - people ) announced this week that by September it would let go of 130 workers at its operations in Huntsville, Ala. Those job losses are a direct result of cuts in federal missile defense spending scheduled to take effect in 2010. They will affect Boeing's work on the Defense Department's Ground-Based Midcourse Defense program. The company expects to cut an additional 100 or so jobs elsewhere for similar reasons.


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