Recession impact on residential engineering and surveying company

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We are certainly seeing some cost cutting measures. In the last 6 months we have had our yearly vacation carry over limited to 80hrs, we have seen our profit sharing turn into a selective performance bonus, our retirement funds have been frozen, we are losing our weekend pay bonus (5% pay loss for me, 10% for the other night shift). Now we are told that because of the 10% pay cut by the other shift we will have to change our work schedule to cover one of the weekend nights they have been working. So now every other weekend I will work Saturday and Sunday nights.

Historically this has been considered one of the best high tech companies to work for due to the excellent worker environment, it is gone. Oh yeah, you may have heard of the company, HP.

Bill and Dave and all that they stood for is dead. :cry:
 
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lisab said:
Yikes! Wonder if they're done with them yet.

Are you looking now? Or do you think you'll just hunker down, lay low, and see if you'll be OK?

Probably not a bad time to at least update your resume, like chemisttree suggested.

I sat down with the owner of the company yesterday and we discussed this. I promised I won't abandon him and he promised he won't lay me off. Unless the company folds.
 
I work for a utility that is going down the tubes, mostly due to a hostile regulatory environment.

It is so bad the company is selling off more than half of the business (gas) to a privately held company. This is not directly related to the reccession, but it impacts every one here. The cause is increased fuel costs, such that every residential kWh we sell loses us about 1.1 cents. We sell ~1500 megawatts/hour, of that about 300 MW is residential.
40 million dollar loss every month. WE have to try to cover that with bulk power sales.

And up until 6 months ago our residential customer base was growing by 20000 homes/ year. At least it has slowed a lot now.

About 50% of us will be going to the new gas company - the remaining bodies here will go thru a layoff of 350 out of the 1100 remaining positions. So, we go from 3100 employees to 750 in one year.