SmartShoring or Profits over People?

As I may have mentioned before I work for a Fortune 500 company in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago. Just today every employee of the company got a memo from the president of our division explaining our new "SmartShoring" strategy.

What it explains is that we have two new SmartShoring locations and a third one coming up in 2007 that we expect to have 3000+ people working at enterprise wide by five years from now. 400+ members of those 3000+ will come from our division alone.

It goes on to state that although a good percentage of this will come through growth and attrition there will be some "forced reductions" to meet their goals. Just this concept begs the question that if they're going to be moving these jobs via attrition what possibility is there for job growth? You could wait years for a position to open up in a department you want to work in only to have that job moved to another state. On the subject of finding the previous holders of these displaced jobs positions they have to say this (following edited for privacy) :

"This decision was made after months of exploring alternative approaches to meet our profit growth expectations. I can assure you that those associates who are impacted will be treated fairly and the company's management team will do everything within their power to work towards placing them in other company roles within either this division or another."

That is followed up with:

"The ability to accelerate our Smartshore initiative is one of many key strategies that we must execute successfully as a Corporation if we are to deliver the margin improvements expected."

Now I'm sure that my company is NOT the only one doing this as nothing happens around here that hasn't been done by every other company in the world first so my question to everyone is this? Wasn't there a time when that speech all of the executives are always giving about the importance of our employees was the truth? Wasn't there a time when companies cared about their people at least close to as much as their profits? Ok, maybe that's asking too much... didnt' they used to care about us at all?

I was about to go into a tangent about pay increases but I realize that's a topic for another time. Anyone else have any feelings on the matter?

Thanks for reading and have a great day everyone!