If you are employed now, are you more busy, less busy, or the same?

[TomCADem]

Poll question: If you are employed now, are you more busy, less busy, or the same?

How are things at the workplace? Are you working your butt off because you are trying to complete more work, but with less people? Or, are you just trying to kill time by sharpening and re-sharpening pencils? Or, is the amount of work exactly the same as it was back in 2007 or so before the recession began?

[Bonobo]

1. More busy. US productivity is increasing even as we are fired one by one.

They just tighten down the screws on those that remain.

We are all forced to increase our "productivity" under the threat of losing our jobs.

Translation: They are now working us to death.

[Lisa0825]

2. My coworkers and I are working about 60 hours a week (salary).

Yet the dept can't get approval to hire more staff. They are trying to improve processes to make the work more efficient... so many we can get "down to 50 hours." Yes, the director actually said that at our last meeting.

But I am on a temp contract and thankful to have a job at all.

[TomCADem]

4. More Busy, Too

When people leave, they are not being replaced at my work. Yet, the amount of work has been increasing with less people to perform that work. Increasingly, people at my work are just having lunch at their desks even while raises have been largely post-poned due to the recession.

[rucky]

10. I'm looking for hourly work (IT) - contract if need be.

No way I'm taking the salaried bait again.

[MilesColtrane]

3. Self employed

Same amount of work...but less pay.

[TlalocW]

5. In a way I'm both

Over a year ago, the owner of the small website designer/programming place I was at felt I was getting bored working there (I was and some new people in the company were making waves about me not being professional enough) and talked to me about moving into a contractor role. I agreed and left the lead programmer role but went and got another job as a contract programmer at another place. They let me go after about a half year because it was time to do the budget, and they needed to cut money to appease their stockholders so I start contracting for the first company "full time" which wasn't that much at first.

I also have a side business so I decided to try and grow that a little, and I have. Now I rarely work a 40 hour week with the regular job, and the side business normally just keeps me busy on weekends. As a contractor though I'm paid more, but I'm also bothered by the boss at night more, and recently I had to stay up late to prepare things for Garth Brooks' announcement from last week (we did his website, and only I know how to access the servers it's on). And recently my side business has been keeping me up later on Fridays and getting me up earlier on Saturdays the last month.

Now I'm working from home all the time. Fortunately, my second job forces me to interact with people as I'm already a homebody. My "on-the-record" income doesn't look too impressive for most of the year, but lately, and not to brag, my twice-a-month checks have been bigger as a contractor than when I worked there, and that's for less hours worked, and I've been getting some pretty big jobs with my side business.

TlalocW

[TomCADem]

7. That seems to be the rule - Look at state and local government furloughs

People are working less hours to accomplish the same amount of work. Worse, due to the increased demands on state and local government services, the workload itself may often increase as the available number of hours to complete that work has decreased.

[kestrel91316]

6. Self-employed - business is down almost 3 years in a row. The drop

started when CA real estate started to fail at the very end of 2006.

That said, it shows occasional but inconsistent signs of life the last several months, just nothing sustained.

[IDemo]

8. Busy as hell

They are continuing to hire and we will be relocating to a larger building very shortly.

[Brigid]

19. Wow.

What business are you in?

[IDemo]

20. Electronics manufacturing - R&D

This is also a company which just had a huge layoff in another division, however. Manufacturing itself will very likely never return here to any significant degree.

[rucky]

9. Unemployed and every bit as busy.

but the pay really, really stinks.

[scarletwoman]

11. I'm working my butt off. I'm an administrative assistant to a VP who's under pressure.

HIS pressure becomes MY pressure. I have to continuously create ever more spreadsheets and documents to make HIM look good to his superiors.

Don't get me wrong, my boss is a wonderful, kind and compassionate human being. It's just that in order to protect MY job, I have to protect HIS job by pushing myself to the limit to give him what he needs in order to keep the top people happy with him. Plus, I have to do work for all the managers in his department who aren't allowed any assistants.

I'm an hourly wage employee, and I almost never take breaks anymore. I eat at my desk, work off the clock (because our department would get in trouble if I worked overtime), and answer work emails from home.

I'm just lucky that I really love my job and the people I work with. Fundamentally, this obviously isn't fair, but I don't know what else to do. I couldn't survive without this job. I'll be 60 years old next month, I live in rural area with very few other employment prospects, if I lost my job I'd be well and truly fucked.

sw

[skygazer]

12. More busy. Fewer employees, as much or more work

I work in a grocery store. We've been running a tighter and tighter schedule for the last couple of years anyway. Allotted hours are based on sales. Sales are down but I honestly don't think we're selling that much less - people are just buying less expensive items. So we have nearly the same amount of customers, nearly the same amount of work to do, but a lot fewer people to do it. And many of those people are new hires because they are weeding out the more experienced (i.e. higher paid) help.

[TomCADem]

24. Deja Vu? "Work Smarter, Not Harder"

I have had the misfortune of working through three recessions. At first, things slow down even as folks denied that we were in recession. However, when things appeared to be at their worst, and unemployment was at its height, I was lucky enough not to get laid off, but I was also very, very busy. But, due to concerns about the economy, I could not really go looking for a job with more humane hours.

Finally, only when my employer started losing its best employees, did the employer start hiring. In the case of my last employer, after I left, it then hired two more employees in my section, which would have been great if the employer had hired at least one of them when I was still working there.

My take is that unemployment will remain high for the next year even as business improves, because employers have employees in a bad place. Employers can demand that employees work hard, perhaps even off the clock, due to fears of being stuck in a bad job market. There really is no reason for an employer to hire new employees even if they are busy, because you can just squeeze the existing work force.

In the next few months, expect to hear employers say, "Work Smarter, Not Harder" with Dilbert cartoons about employer mistreatment popping up in the workplace.

[noamnety]

13. teacher here - much busier

I am back to full time. Some years I am part time depending on enrollment and the economy (state funding). This year we have formerly private school students enrolling, a lot of families had to cut tuition expenses and are facing foreclosure because of layoffs.

I have way more students per class this year because of overall teacher cutbacks.

I also unofficially do more admin work this year because of a cutback there.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

14. Good news....

If you get fired, you can sue them for back pay they didn't pay you for overtime and lunch breaks and coffee breaks not taken. That is under Federal labor laws.


Bad news, they can destroy your health and your sanity. I had mine destroyed a long time ago. I haven't worked in a long time either.

[cmf]

15. We have been operating with a deficit of people for several years now

Whenever management would hire someone new in my group, it seems like someone else would leave around the same time. Now there is a hiring freeze with no end in sight. Also, we have to take furlough days, so we have to make up the work at other times, even though technically they're supposed to reduce our workload to account for the furlough. It's pretty crazy making, but I like the work and at least the days go quickly.

[jules1962]

16. My company replaces full time people with part time

to avoid giving so many benefits. I work in the accounting office of a large store and where I used to count an average of 75.00 or so coupons a night,I now count between 500.00 and 800.00 dollars worth. Amount of cash has gone down somewhat though. The amount of unemployment checks I process is huge.

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

17. More busy.

2 promotions more so than anything else are the likely cause.

[HughMoran]

18. Too busy

There will have to be hiring soon I hope.

[vadawg]

21. less busy, though the same on days i work, thet overtime was cut back

so now i get to spend the 15 days a month i am not working doing other stuff, kinda happy that the overtime decision was taken for me...

[buzzycrumbhunger]

22. Less, with a caveat

I do medical transcription. We've lost tons of work to India, but the real insult is that lousy speech recognition has taken over the crap that's left--meaning all the companies have been sold a bill of goods by developers and vendors on a product that doesn't work well at all. . . and in struggling to use it, they're paying us half as much to work twice as hard as straight transcription. The company doesn't even care that it doesn't work because they get to pocket that much more that used to be payroll (already decimated by offshore competition because our wages dropped by three-fourths to compete with people willing to work for the equivalent of $4/day).

If I could figure out where to take my skill set, I'd be gone by now. We used to joke that it would be more lucrative to give $300 BJs because we're already keyboard whores but for a lot of us, that's looking way too much like the only real alternative. Just heard my third coworker in a week is on the verge of losing her home because she's taking home less than half of what she used to. :(

[tammywammy]

23. It's the same

I just started at this job at the end of July, but I was just replacing the previous woman that had transferred to another job within the company.

It's government contract work (sort of) so there's a set amount of people to work under the contract. I know they just posted 2 more openings for software engineers.

[Ignis]

25. I'd say "working like a dog," but...

Dogs have it easier than trying to cover three jobs with one person. :(