As Obama takes office and begins “creating jobs” – bless his heart – we’ll see staffing take the same fate as it has in already-socialist Europe.
For you staffing company owners, this isn’t all bad. Employers will turn to you as they seek anti-virus protection from the do-gooders in Washington with their ever increasing regulation and generous, unfunded-mandates: employer-paid healthcare, PTO and so on ad-nauseum.
It’s not all good either, not by a long shot, as this story on Vedior in Portugal demonstrates. As is typical in European staffing, Vedior contracts with both the customer and with the workers. When workers strike, as they have a call center TMN, who do they negotiate with, Vedior or TMN? It’s ambiguous, and the comments from the workers who appended to the story make clear that the ambiguity angers them more.
This is all a bad harbinger for America and for staffing as well. Remember that Europe has managed to survive this onslaught on free markets by a) being an incredible rich continent historically and b) having all that wealth increasingly concentrated on a rapidly decreasing population.
Neither of those conditions is true in the USA. As Obama freezes up labor market fluidity like a Minnesota winter on an un-drained sprinkler system, staffing may prosper but the lot of the American worker will not.
