Small business....

!

As a Materials Manager, I talk to lots of vendors who ALL say the same thing: business is up, WAY up. But confidence is not up. So businesses aren't hiring. They just work people harder, and they use employment services (part timers) to pick up the slack.

The summer rush is slowing down, so the part-timer hours will drop off too. Full timers will be dropping back to 40 hours instead of the usual 50+ per week they've been putting in.

It's a sign of a leaner work force, and probably won't change much.
 
eflexter said:
As a Materials Manager, I talk to lots of vendors who ALL say the same thing: business is up, WAY up. But confidence is not up. So businesses aren't hiring. They just work people harder, and they use employment services (part timers) to pick up the slack.

The summer rush is slowing down, so the part-timer hours will drop off too. Full timers will be dropping back to 40 hours instead of the usual 50+ per week they've been putting in.

It's a sign of a leaner work force, and probably won't change much.
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As a dispatcher I'm seeing the same thing at the RR... we're running trains like nuts and in general they are huge... not the little 2000-3000 footers we were running for a while when the economy really tanked. Now we have 7000+ footers in lots of places. Some of the territories in our office have been in a state of continuous meltdown for several weeks. It's so busy we don't have the crew base to bail it out! And when we do have a crew, the 'limo services' that we hire to transport crews to the trains don't have enough vans or drivers to get relief crews to all the trains that have run out of time. The net result is trains that can't get across a territory that is supposed to take one crew! Instead it's taking 2, and sometimes 3 crews! Fuel consumption goes up, crew cost go up, locomotive and car utilization go down...

And my 8+ hours sucks as I battle it out with pissed off tired crews who don't care anymore. We just joke "Hey, at least we've got jobs!" because the RR I work for sliced lots of jobs when the economy tanked. (they saw their shot and they took it!)
 
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