Layoff meetings are never fun, but this one was surreal.
PennySaver workers filed into the printing plant of company headquarters in Brea, squeezing tight amid the machinery, to find their boss, Chief Executive Ronald Myers, sitting silently at a table.
Then, echoing through the 100,000-square-foot building, they heard the voice of Barry L. Kasoff, president of Realization Services Inc., a firm specializing in corporate restructurings. It was Kasoff who presided over the meeting by phone from the firm’s New York offices over two loudspeakers.
The workers had been shocked late Friday to learn that the advertising newsletter publisher owned by private equity firm OpenGate Capital had abruptly shut, and they were suddenly jobless.
As employees held up phones to record the call, Kasoff described the firm’s financial problems — drooping revenue, rising postage costs and an inability to…
