This is getting really monotonous, not to mention nerve-wracking. Things have been really, really slow at my workplace for a while now, and it’s making me and my co-workers really, really nervous. Since I’m in a highly cyclical industry (employment-based immigration law), our clients have been sending us less and less work. On one hand, it’s kind of nice to be able to sit and think about what I’m writing rather than just churning stuff out at warp speed like I used to have to do. But on the other hand, we all know what a work slowdown means for our own continued employment prospects.
When I was first hired here 4 years ago, there were about 15 of us, and now there are about 50, but that number has remained stable for about the past year. Also, we’ve apparently given up on the idea of hiring administrative staff as regular, permanent employees, and have brought in temps to handle most routine administrative tasks. A couple of weeks ago they got rid of half the administrative temps (I wasn’t terribly sorry to see these individuals go, as they were rather error-prone even after several months of training, which was very annoying), and there is currently no plan to replace them. In addition, rumor has it that our less-junior rung of legal support staff, the ones who handle all the data entry and scheduling of work and case management-type followups, will be eliminated one of these days, and the work that they did will fall back on the caseworkers. We are being reminded multiple times a week to make sure that we’ve completed all our invoices, and reminded to make sure there isn’t any additional billable work which a) we used to do as a freebie, but maybe should be billing for; or b) which would normally come further down the timeline, but which could conceivably be pushed up and completed now. They’ve even eliminated the pastries for our weekly staff meeting as a “cost-cutting measure.” (OTOH, I know what I bill annually vs. what I make in salary, so my heart doesn’t exactly bleed for the equity partners, but that’s a rant for another day, and a much more colorful one at that.)
So what will it take, already, to juice up the economy? The war’s over, right? We can go back to business as usual, right? If there’s no hiring going on, there’s certainly even less hiring of foreign nationals, and while I don’t argue that that phenomenon is as it should be, I’m an American, and I want to remain employed, too!
