Yahoo: "Let Us Eat and Drink, for Tomorrow Your Jobs Die"

Come tomorrow, Yahoo will sack some 1,500 employees, depriving them of their livelihoods and turning them into data points on a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment graph. That it will do this amid the worst recession in 50 years is understandable.

That it will do it four days after a lavish holiday party is astonishing (click on the image above).

Appalling, actually.

Nearly as appalling as the party’s Vegas theme and decor. Was there no better use for the considerable funds put toward this party and its pirate ships and showgirls and diminutive Eiffel Tower?

Of course there was: The more than 1,500 Yahoos who will be left without jobs in an increasingly ugly recession right before the winter holidays.

Now perhaps the event had been planned and paid for, and Yahoo (YHOO) had no recourse but move forward with it. But honestly, how far in advance would it have had to have been planned and purchased for the company’s leadership to have been oblivious to this ugly December it’s now facing?

Yahoo announced layoffs in October. It hired management consulting outfit Bain & Co. to help it “get fit” back in September. And it’s had “layoffs” written all over it since…well, since the last time it announced layoffs 10 months ago.

Perhaps, the demand for portable Eiffel Towers, Elvis wedding chapels, Vegas showgirls and Tina Turner impersonators this year was so great that a nonrefundable deposit was required to secure them far in advance of this event, and the fiscally responsible Yahoo just couldn’t bear to lose it.

But even if it was, shouldn’t the company, out of conscience, have canceled it anyway? To do otherwise is grossly insensitive. Isn’t it?

[Image credits: Photos used with kind permission of Digital Kamehameha/Flickr]