A snippet:

While demand has waned for clerks and other low-skilled workers, experts say opportunity abounds for those with specialized skills in fast-growing fields like health care, engineering and information technology.

Accountemps, a staffing firm that focuses on the financial sector, reported an increase in hiring in southeast Michigan for both entry-level and senior-level workers. Mergers, closings and other business-to-business transactions require short-term accounting help, according to Kristen Cislo, a Southfield-based branch manager.

In addition to financial services, workers in engineering, health care, information technology and science are wanted “across the board,” according to Shaun Fracassi, a senior vice president and general manager at Kelly Services.

Check out her e-mail for a clue of where she’s from: “a2.”

Waving at you, Lisa, from Monroe!

A snippet:

The hiring company probably wants to make sure it only pays what it has to. For example, when I was hired last summer it was on a temp-to-hire basis. After about 2 weeks, my boss told me she was planning to hire me but the company had a policy.

They were paying the agency, which was paying me. The agency took a commission on my pay, so I made $X/hour and they were paid $Y an hour.

A snippet:

Local agencies blame the area’s poor economy. Complicating the situation, they say: Job-seekers often have limited educations.

“When you hit a recession, the first people laid off are staffing people,” said Bruce Rumpf, owner of Job 1 USA, a Toledo staffing agency. …

At Qualified Staffing in Perrysburg, branch manager Maria Nevarez has noticed the same, albeit in an unexpected way.

“I’ve had a lot of people come to me that are former chief executive officers making $150,000, who are now willing to take my $30,000 job,” she said.

I worked through a temporary agency for a summer job when I was in college. My college daughter’s summer job this year was also arranged through a staffing agency.

It is an ideal situation for people who are seeking short-term work assignments.

But when you’re relying on a paycheck to keep the bills paid, which likely includes some of those laid-off workers who are mentioned in the Blade story, it is a horrible situation to have to rely on a staffing agency for your job connections.

Because temporary work is part of the backstory behind Monroe on a Budget, some of you are already familiar with what my family went through:

When my husband lost a job in 2002 because of a company sale / corporate downsizing, he went to a temporary agency to find a job. For the next four years, all of his paychecks came through the staffing agency.

We didn’t have much choice – his degree was in radio broadcasting and his employment record was in radio broadcasting with several years of shipping and receiving prior to that. Nobody was hiring in the field for which he was most qualified; and other employers had so many applicants (50 resumes in one case) that businesses could easily find someone who already had the job skills for whatever post they had open.

There are no negotiations on work schedule or pay rate – it’s “Here is the pay and the location. Do you want this assignment? If so, you start tomorrow.”

Now, consider the consequences of unpredictable work schedules for those of you who are also:

• Trying to schedule retraining courses. (My husband was able to finish only three classes at Monroe County Community College.)
• Have family obligations to take care of such as driving kids to their appointments. (Because we couldn’t rely on my husband being available on any given day, all those errands had to be arranged around my full-time work schedule.)
• Have medical appointments to arrange. (How far in advance do you need to book a dentist appointment that is convenient to YOUR work hours?)
• Have day care to arrange. (Thankfully we had a teen-ager at home!)

There was about a year when my husband was barely working with one short-term, low-paying factory assignment after another and unemployment checks in between.

During May 2005, he worked only four days at $7 an hour.

His next assignment turned out to be a long-term post. But it was a difficult situation to be commuting from Monroe to Livonia for a temp job when gas prices were $3.19 a gallon

My husband did finally did land a local “permanent” factory job in 2006, but it’s not a job we consider to be very secure. He’s working at an auto parts supplier these days.

A snippet:

Nor do the unemployment figures include people, such as most sales clerks, whose hours have been cut because consumer spending is down. Or the small-business owners whose sales have plummeted. Though they’ve not suffered as much as workers who have lost jobs, these people have seen their living standards fall, with far-reaching consequences for themselves and the overall economy. …

Though shrunken paychecks can hurt morale, John Bremen, a director in Watson Wyatt’s compensation consulting practice, notes, companies often regard layoffs as more problematic over the long run. Many employers prefer not to have to invest the time and money involved in hiring new people or rehiring old ones — some of whom will be disgruntled — once business rebounds.

“People understand in a bad year they get a smaller bonus or no bonus, but it’s much harder to understand losing their job,” Bremen says. “When profits are not as high, (companies) can reduce compensation costs by 10% to 15% instead of having to lay off 10% to 15% of employees.”

Other employment scenarios that have been happening in southeast Michigan:

• High-paying job positions disappearing, replaced by lower-paying jobs (sometimes even when you still work for the same company!).
• No pay raises (don’t even talk about bonuses).
• Companies who contract out a large percentage of their workforce through a temporary staffing agency rather than actually hiring anybody.
• Companies who schedule long-term shutdowns to keep expenses down – while their employees rely on unemployment benefits.

The answer is: If my husband and I hadn’t moved to southeast Michigan a few years ago, we would have stayed in northwest Ohio where most of our family lives.

While Toledo is a commute-able distance from Monroe, and we do drive back and forth to Ohio on a frequent basis, the job market there isn’t any better than it is here.

This story in today’s Toledo Blade explains state lines don’t matter in a regional economy where everyone is scrambling for work: Jobs scarce in area in 2007.

A snippet:

For former auto worker Jerry Brockway, the trail of temporary jobs has stretched from Toledo to Romulus, Mich.

“I’ve been wanting a job for 30 months,” the 51-year-old Ida, Mich., man said. “I’ve ended up with about 30 checks out of about 30 months. I kept wanting to find a new job, all throughout 2007. I go to Michigan Works. I go to The Source, and all I get is temporary jobs that don’t lead to anything.”