GatewayRedbirds.com

While admittedly it's better than eliminating jobs, it still seems counterproductive to do things like cut expense budgets and mileage reimbursement. How is that going to help companies sell more?

Take customers to the free happy hour at Residence Inn.

When my old company went through cost cutting in 2003, they made trash pickup at corporate every Tuesday and Friday instead of every day.

This lead to an invasion by a family of racoons and it took them 3 days to round them all up.

See the article last week where GM is cutting out company matching 401k contributions along with tuition reimbursement and adoption aide? We haven't heard anything official yet about what's going on at my employer. It's a scary time though. A year ago we laid off over 160 folks. Everyone's on tenterhooks right now.

We have our benefits fair at work this week and got our insurance info for next year. It barely went up, just like the usual nothing too much. What they have changed though is we used to be able to cash in up to 80 hours of vacation twice a year, now we can only cash in 80 hours one time per year. Nothing else has changed.....yet.

I spoke too soon. 6 people in our local office of less than 50 people were let go today (and about the same percentage in other offices). Now I'm embarrassed of my rant. Times are definitely scary.

While I was interning over the summer, we cut out the entire commercial side of our production leaving us as solely a military contractor. It didn't affect me because I was hired for working on a Navy project, but in an office with only like 25 people, you see the effects pretty clearly. When I 1st started, there was a guy that really made me feel welcome and would ask me daily how I was liking the internship. He went on vacation and I noticed 2 weeks later that he still wasn't back, then eventually they announced that the commercial side was shut down, and it was then I remembered that he was head of the commercial side. They said he has a lot of good connections and will land on his feet very easily, but it still sucked.

cards2468 wrote:While I was interning over the summer, we cut out the entire commercial side of our production leaving us as solely a military contractor. It didn't affect me because I was hired for working on a Navy project, but in an office with only like 25 people, you see the effects pretty clearly. When I 1st started, there was a guy that really made me feel welcome and would ask me daily how I was liking the internship. He went on vacation and I noticed 2 weeks later that he still wasn't back, then eventually they announced that the commercial side was shut down, and it was then I remembered that he was head of the commercial side. They said he has a lot of good connections and will land on his feet very easily, but it still sucked.

Also, the flip side is even with connections, many companies that aren't laying people off themselves are certainly not hiring. The timing is also bad; not many companies hire people right before Christmas. When my co-worker told his seven year old son he lost his job, he started crying. Luckily, my co-worker still has a sense of humor because he explained his son was crying because he wouldn't get his Playstation 3 for Christmas.

Definitely tough times. Mrs. Rad has weekly stories of cutbacks at her work, and while she's survived so far, we don't know how long that will hold true.

My situation is good right now, but that's because I'm in a niche due to attrition. My group supports the government, and having a security clearance is a big plus. Most of my group is in the DC area, and everyone else with a clearance was lured away by greener pastures - the competition inside the beltway for these folks is fierce. So right now, I'm the only cleared resource left. Good for job security, but that's also why I'm travelling so much. Otherwise, at my age and level, I would definitely be nervous. And they are working on getting more cleared people onboard, so my personal security is likely short-lived.

We both had clearances when we lived in Houston and worked in/around the space center, so I'm sure she could get hers back without too much trouble. If push comes to shove, we may have to move to the Washington area to take advantage of that market.