Live~NRGY

Calgary’s oil boom threatens to bust the middle class – The Globe and Mail.

I just absolutely love Calgary. There’s unlimited work possibilities in all areas. One thing to be careful of is working for agencies that promise X number of days only to have the employer who hired the temp workers from a temp agency cancel them because they are poorly managed and organized.

Temp agencies are for temp work – that true. So your work at any one company will be limited. But if the temp work you are promised and expected to show up to do the work when it is required, then the company doing the hiring should get it’s act together.

Case in point – case study. Let’s call our friend here – Donny boy. Works for a furniture company with warehouse size stock. Needs unloading, sorting, inventory count, uncrating, assembly in many cases, tagged and brought out to the floor.

Ad nauseaum until BIG SALE is done. Well imagine that, sale as another few days to go, and out of inventory. Still lots of stock on the floor though.

So at the beginning of the exercise – 5 guys hired. Then kept on, until one fine day, ooops – I’ve got to many guys sent to me – who wants to skip town and hit the road. No one volunteers – so Donny boy cans one. On with the show – more work. Then running low at some point once the inventory starts running out.

OKAY, now it’s time to re-org the warehouse. Clean it up a tad. Still 2 days to go and oops, now like gangbusters near the end of the day – Donny boy is in a hurry. Let’s get organized real quick – hustle to it. As if a fire sale is about to hit and what maybe more stock on it’s way.

But hold your horses! Pow wow called – news is no work for the next day. Oooops, call your temp agency and get them to get you more work for tomorrow. End of story.

Let’s back up here a bit. Earlier in the day, I could see what was what. Asked Donny boy – assistant manager I’ll venture that if there was going to be no work that day, I was okay about leaving early. No no, no problem – lots of work. I just hate to hang around doing nothing when nothing useful gets done. But then Ka-Pow…. later in the day – no work tomorrow ! That NEWS is given in the very last hour before end of the day.

Let’s back track some more – the other Store Manager is trying to keep everything together and increasing store sales. The assistant manager in the way he gave the news to the temp labourers just blows that away in less then 1 minute.

Here’s the reasoning. Tons of money is spent on advertising sales and in some way and fashion BRANDING the COMPANY NAME vs the competition. Everyone knows that bad news travels at the speed of light and good well – like a turtle at the speed of sound. Hard to rack up sales numbers and keep them that way when all you do is kill the BRAND in every way possible.

It’s a food chain stupid – Branding works the same way. From lowly janitors all the way up to the top sales men, once you’ve got traffic in the door, keeping it is the highest priority.

Companies that work against themselves are slated to be toasted. Simple as that. I don’t care if employees are on contract, full or part time or temp labour, sales or even delivery and logistics – every piece of the puzzle fits together to keep up the brand value.

Eatons is a prime example. K-mart at the other end of the spectrum. Zellers knew the writing was on the wall. It doesn’t matter anymore whether you’re a top player or dollar store. It’s all about BRANDING.

And the store that I worked for this past weekend – well I can see they have mega problems. BTW – Some temp labour broke a perfectly nice dining room table. One leg broken, but still in a state that if given to someone or a family in need, with a bit of elbow grease and basic gluing skills it could have been fixed.

Donny boy made absolutely sure that it was toasted into pieces. You see I asked if I could take the table and bring it home earlier before he broke it up. Nope, no can do. Okay I get it – some people break stuff to bring it home. No problem. So temp labour puts the thing out by the garbage bins since it didn’t fit in it and what does Donny boy do at one point? I overstacked the garbage bins, he picks up the table and throws it on top and proceeds to jump like a KANGAROO on it to squish UNCOMPRESSIBLE STYROFOAM.

Problem in that company is the amount of waste styrofoam generated by discarded packaging. Way too much for 1 bin. Besides I saw the garbage truck pickup FULL GARBAGE & CARDBOARD BINS AND THROW IT IN THE SAME TRUCK COMPARTMENT. TALK ABOUT RECYCLING – YIKES!

WHAT’S THE POINT ? WONDER IF THAT’S WHAT’S HAPPENING EVERYWHERE NOW AT ALL COMPANIES? Someone should be checking to see if big companies and garbage companies are doing their recycling work properly.

Oh, and I did tell Donny Boy about it, be he just went on and dismissed it and was told to get back to work.

BRAND VALUE NEGATIVE TERRITORY !

NAME OF THE STORE – THE BRICK !

I GUESS THEY HIT A BRICK WALL ! TOO BAD ON THE LOSS OF BRAND VALUE.

COMPETITION WILL END UP EATING COMPANIES WITH INCOMPETENT MANAGERS AND ASSISTANT MANAGERS – TREAT PEOPLE RIGHT ! IN THIS CASE – IT’S ALL ON DONNY BOY’S HEAD. SHAME SHAME.

SURE NOT TO BUY THERE NOW.

MORAL OF THE STORY – DO YOUR HOMEWORK BEFORE WORKING FOR SOME COMPANIES.

But there’s no doubt that of ALL THE PLACES IN NORTH AMERICA NOW – CALGARY IS THE PLACE TO BE !