Posted on 07/30/2004 5:05:51 PM PDT by Archangelsk
"Group by group, job by job, industry by industry, our lives are being destroyed."
What a bunch of baloney...what do you do for a living? Fuller Brush man?
I apologise, but I thought I had thouroghly checked this thread for you, and found no reason for anyone to reply to you regarding the topic.
I usually ping another poster, if I mention them in my post.
Since I often employ massive doses of sarcasm, it often seems we get pinged to some threads we have no particular knowledge of, due to our poster names.
Sorry you were disturbed.
Its not cuckoo land. People who leave jobs voluntarily very often do so with a raise in the process. But with the involuntary layoffs of the last few years (really starting in 1999-2000) many people are starting up again with new employers at a lower rate than before.
For the last couple of years at least it's been a buyer's market for professional (especially IT) staff. Of course people are starting off with a new employer at a lower rate than before. This is neither unnatural nor surprising.
It's unnatural in a supposedly booming economy.
No problem!
So you're willing to risk losing the intellectual capital you've invested into your workers? That must be one helluva an ND you've got on them to be able to afford that.
We calculate that we get no return on a new employee for at least two years.
Supposedly booming? The economy isn't booming, it's simply normally healthy. Modest numbers for inflation, interest rates, unemployment, GDP growth... it's not a boom.
We don't really need or want a "boom" either. It will probably (or inevitably) happen again, but the boom-bust cycle is a temporal and volatile anomaly in the ordinary business cycle. The less volatile the cycle, the less trauma to the system, employees, employers and regulatory influences.
A modestly growing but fundamentally strong economy is better for more people.
Based on what? Your company is willing to absorb the overhead of two years before a ROI? Uh, pardon, but that's not a sound business model to me. (Unless, of course, your employees are paying you for the privlege to work).
I would say that we're on the path to another recession.
We've been around since the 1930's and haven't had a loss yet. We've also never laid anyone off.
Really. So what exactly does your company do that it isn't affected by normal business cycles? (I worked for Big Blue - you may have heard of them - for awhile, and we were affected by business cycles so your company must be a large sheet in the bedrock of the economy).
No... I don't like to lose people. As it would happen, the employee that I was talking about above decided not to leave for the other company, even though they offered about 10% more. I didn't have to counter. In truth... the outside offer came to him unsolicited. He wasn't out looking for it.
I told this person that I already *know* that he's worth more than he's being paid. He's a good egg. I've been fighting for 10-15% raises for him every year for the last five years, and getting them, plus about a 10% bonus. I'm trying to be as fair as I can be, and I'm doing the best I can for him. I think there are many employers that wouldn't be able to do what I've been able to do with my staff.
But a mistake I made some years ago was to counter when a particular employee had been out job-shopping. He'd only been with us for about six months. He was hired before I was his manager, but when I looked at his resume it was clear that he was a job-shopper. He hadn't been *anywhere* for more than six months in about four years. He got another offer and I countered for more to try to keep him... he took the counter, but left three months later anyway.
We're also small compared to Big Blue - 65,000 worldwide.
Of course we are. There will be upside and downside fluctuations in the economy. The only thing it *won't* do with any certainty is stay the same.
There is also just dang near nuthin' that anybody's administration will be able to do about it, either. Lower taxes are good and let the economy grow if the business cycle is there make it happen, but the business cycle forces are what really moves us from up to down and back again.
Administrations get to take the credit, and are given the blame for the state of the economy, but rarely do they ever have anything substantive to do with it. Tax policy does have an effect, and regulatory ominousness has an effect, but they aren't a year-to-year effect. Those are decade-to-decade effects. IMHO.
A whole lot of people were being overpaid at the peak of the dot.com boom which is when this comparson starts.
Woohoo! We're about 700 worldwide... 25 offices in the U.S. One in U.K. One in Germany and one in Poland, and we're staking out territory in Italy pretty soon... plus some good productive activities in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Objects in mirror may be larger than they appear. :-)
OK, so we're not in your league... but we're fortunate to be in a business that wasn't smoked by downturns. We've actually seen good growth in all of the last five or six years. My department has grown from 10 to 16 since 2000.
Then we don't have to worry about their economic policy?
We're actually much smaller, employee wise, than we were twenty years ago. I believe that we've shed somewhere around 20,000 positions through retirement and other attrition. The days of the private secretary are also long gone.
President Bush can be castigated for some things, but not for the personal financial decisions individuals make.
Baloney. He's expedited that giant sucking sound, and individuals had no imput on those "decisions." Wake up and smell the coffee. These people will be voting. Until the spin stops and something tangible is done about it, the Independents will continue to grow. Perouka is the only candidate who hasn't promised roses, but has stated precisely what he'll do about the situation.
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