Sad but true

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
- Walter Bagehot

On the business front, a friend lost her job recently because the small, locally-owned drug store where she works in the pharmacy is going under. The problem seems to have been that the owner needed to borrow money and the banks were unwilling to lend. Naturally our friend sees all this as an injustice, and it does sound like it is more a consequence of the economic times than of problems with that particular business.

The news about GM is also sad. Although Tom and a partner ran their own IT business the last years before Tom retired, Tom himself worked under contract full time as a consultant for GM in Detroit. He used to commute between Chicago and Detroit every week. Anyway, lots of the people he worked with are looking at an end to what they had assumed would be a lifetime job.

Locally the newspapers are full of letters complaining that the big tourist resorts -- not the railroad, us being a tiny dot on the economic horizon of the Dells -- recruit workers overseas while people here need jobs, too. The resorts are fighting back with stories in the papers that they do plan to hire locally, but they need more seasonal staff than is available here.

Bits of truth on all sides there, as is usually the case. The resorts tend to pay minimum wage, offer only part time jobs with no benefits and force people into trying to coordinate two to three jobs with rotating schedules. It is easy to see why they are not the employer of choice for local residents. The jobs may be okay for a student just trying to earn spending money, but they are not great for folks trying to raise a family.

Also, the resorts apparently have earned a terrible reputation in the parts of Europe where they have been recruiting in the past. It varies from employer to employer, of course, but some provide their workers with terrible lodging -- in one case, they literally had guys living in a storage closet -- and make them work long hours at low pay, again with no benefits. This past year they had trouble getting people to come, partly because the exchange rate on the dollar was bad and partly because people in Poland and Russia were starting to hear bad things about working here.

Anyway, this is the time of year when they start hiring for those seasonal jobs, so, like it or not, folks are out there applying like mad. At least they have a chance of finding something to get them through until next fall.