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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (13775)	9/21/2003 9:34:24 AM
From: GraceZ	Respond to of 306849

I know in the way my business has changed in the last three years that ramping up means I put more computers on line, not add employees. If I need to add people I'll do it with sub-contractors. A friend of mine in the publishing industry was laid off from her fulltime position as a photo editor around Sept 2001. What is funny is that she's had little time when she was not working since even though she's not an employee officially. In fact her first freelance job was working for the very company she was laid off from (one of those big media companies which made big headlines with the numbers they were laying off). She got laid off on a Friday and was told to show up on Monday as a freelancer. She's made about the same amount as the average of the three years before she was laid off but she feels like she's always out of a job because she's hired only for months at a time at the different magazines she's worked at. Everyone has a hiring freeze, so they can only use her as a freelancer. Same thing with my brother-in-law who was an IT manager for a chemical company. He was laid off in 2001 and then hired back at both that company and the previous company he worked for to write software and develop their systems on his own. Instead of 180k with benefits he's eeking out 100k and paying for his own benefits. Recently he found out the hard way what happens when you don't put anything aside for the estimated payments. When I ask him how work is going he says, "I still don't have a job." Unfortunately things may have changed permanently for both of these people. Their previous salaries and imagined "job security" was a function of an unsustainable investment boom (as well as one off things like Y2K). Big companies may in fact be over reacting to the bust and acting a little too cautious in hiring but it has yet to hurt them, most are experiencing reduced overhead expenses and moving back to profitability. They've found a way to lower their employment costs and still retain the asset. It remains to be seen if they'll be able to do that if things do start to cook again.