Archive for January, 2008

So it seems good ol’ Emporia is having a bit of an employment crisis (link to the main story, here). The small town of roughly 26,000 is having one of their largest employers downsize from 2,400 to 900 (Tyson Foods, a major beef processing plant). They’re moving their slaughter operations to areas closer to the cattle raising farms and feed lots (ooh, what an idea, move the processing closer to where the animals and food is, duh). But with that closure and the layoffs, people are running around fretting like there’s no tomorrow.

It must have been relatively nice to be in an area that hadn’t been touched by the crash of 2000/2001. To see anyone lose their jobs is tragic, but it’s not the end of the world. Beef workers of their own accord didn’t make that much per hour, and it’s far worse to have a half million dollar mortgage and have no job than to have one that pays 25/hour or less on a mortgage of maybe 50,000. For one thing, getting another job or two to make up the per hour, is a hell of a lot easier to come by, and unemployment will cover most of it. How many people realize that there’s a cap on the amount you get paid out for unemployment (although I notice that there’s no upper limit to how much you have taken out of each paycheck).

Reading over the outraged comments, it’s interesting to note how many of the truly long winded rants are all coming from people who don’t even work there. Most of the well thought out and calm posts are from the very people who are being laid off. Not all follow that pattern, but quite a few. The meeting with the town council seems to have been all bluster from the speakers, and glad handing from the officials. No one brought up the idea of examining the tax incentives that the company enjoys, seeing if they could be motivated to keep some more of the workforce in place. The workers never unionized, so there’s no particular redress from there on the point of senior employees having no ability to bump more junior hires (given the local patience with the influx of Somali workers, I’m sure that keeping a green new hire on while laying off a 10+ year veteran will do little to improve the mood of the community with their new townsfolk.)

The company is at least giving severance and some options to transfer elsewhere. They weren’t obliged to do anything other than to pay out the accrued vacation time. Consider how many companies simply go bankrupt and wind up with nothing – no warning, no last check, no PTO, just nothing. And every employee from the moment of the bankrupt filing, are simply additional creditors who have to wait in line to be able to get their slice of whatever happens to be left when the pie gets sliced up some time down the line.

In the follow on story of the city officials putting a Bush-worthy positive spin on things (available here) is rather sad. City Manager Matt Zimmerman was quoted as saying that they were taken completely by surprise. One of the primary functions in a town that size is to keep a pulse on the major businesses and employers in the town. That there’d been no inkling that this was coming down the pipe shows a basic ineptitude for the position he’s been entrusted with. It’s either his own lack of ability, or that of his staff, either way it falls to him to have kept an eye on things.

Let’s take his next award winning quote:

“Like we’ve heard from many employers, there’s not enough of a trained workforce — well, there is now,” Zimmerman said. “So, hopefully, there’ll be much less of an impact than we’re all obviously concerned about… We’re also recognizing that this is an opportunity to diversify.”

Why do I think that while some people may be able to transfer their skillset in the community directly over to a new position (such as at the dog food plant), there’s not a lot of processing plants in Emporia. Just because a person is skilled/trained in one job, doesn’t mean that they can readily drop into something entirely new. A mechanic is a member of a trained workforce, it doesn’t mean that they can jump into being a press operator the next day.

A comparison between this employer pullout and the tornado destruction in Greensburg is additionally silly. In the Greensburg case, you had the employers wanting to rebuild and continue forward. The community had the sense of pulling together and rebounding together as a community. Here it’s a general sense of the collective carpet having been pulled out from under the employees and being let down by the city officials as well as by Tyson. It’s incredibly demoralizing, and the civic leaders need to try to bring a sense of focus and next steps (job retraining, anyone? loan assistance for new business owners? local tax credits for existing employers who create new job positions. These are the kinds of answers that are needed by former workers and their families trying to decide their next steps, not platitudes and vague references about “how it’ll all be ok.”

To Manager Zimmerman, lay out a plan on how those people will find new jobs, retraining, and what the city and the community is willing to do to help. It’s a hard blow, but not unrecoverable; those affected (and the wider community at large) need a sense that there’s a plan forward, something that they can look to as a sign that they’re not going to be forgotten.

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 http://www.rensymposium.com  

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Back in October at the 15th annual Folsom Faire, the group that’s produced it all this time (St. Matthews Guild) announced that it had decided that 15 years was enough and that they would be retiring after last year’s event. They’ll still be performing at Faires as a guild, but no longer producing an event. At that event, Liz Martin (the Lady who’s been the producer for the last several years), announced that she’d be continuing on with a new production team.

All good and well, then in early December, the City of Folsom (who actually owns the Faire), sent out a request for proposal outline to a handful of producers in Northern California. The deadline was today (January 25th). It’s been a hard decision all the way around, I know Liz was annoyed that anyone else going after it (telling one of the other interested producers that it was unprofessional for us to have even shown up for the informational meeting with the city), but if I were in her shoes I can’t say that I’d have been very different. I might have been less surprised, but it wouldn’t change the fact of feeling like you were stuck in the ocean with sharks in the water and a nasty cut on your leg.

Some 50 man-hours of effort later between myself, Marti, and others who all chimed in their $.02 worth, it was finally done early this weekend and we sent it off – all 68 pages of the proposal. It’s probably the most detailed Faire-related document I’ve ever been a part of, but in the end, I’m profoundly proud of it.

I don’t know if we’ll wind up winning the project, but whether we do or not, I’m really at the moment as happy with our presentation as I could be. Over the length of the document’s writing, it helped put into context how much we do across our various groups and departments, and how many things we have to offer. And also how danged good we’ve become in presenting ourselves and in crunching the numbers.

We’re very much not perfect, but I think we know more than most where our imperfections lie, and what our challenges are. At least that way we can work on them as we go.

If we get it, it’ll be posted about here and elsewhere, but for now, we wait, and I keep fingers crossed.

To the other production group pitching for it as well – all the best of wishes and luck, and whomever gets it, I hope it’s a smooth and prosperous year running up to the 16th annual Folsom Faire.

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Anyone who ever got into producing Renaissance Faires to make a pile of cash really need to have their heads examined. Now granted you can make some money, but all it takes is a rain out, snow out, last minute permit issues, or any number of occurances that impact attendence and you can go from an event in the black, to one in the red and sending you running to see about that 2nd mortgage.

The short form of the above is just meant to express that margins on events are very thin, and every new expense has an impact. For years the West Coast has been lucky enough to have a number of Jousting Troupes, and they ranged in expense from $2,500 to $5,000 per weekend for a basic show. Generally the pricing was at $3,500. Now over the last 24 months the prices have all jumped up to the base price being in the $5,000 for a base price.

One of the largest elements of their expenses is of course the insurance, which can be rather high. Spreading it across multiple events would help defray the expense. However it seems that now that events are having to rethink their jousting inclusion on their schedule, forcing prices to rise even higher based on fewer events.

Polling the community, it almost always comes back with the opinion that Jousting is very importaint to the success of an event, but the question stands – how high can it rise before it becomes a losing propisition for the event and the benefit of having one is outweighed by the outlay. Even as it stands for an event to have a joust, the expense isn’t just the flat rate (for example, $5,000), there’s also the inclusion of the expense of hotel rooms (generally demanded), fencing for the arena, seating of some kind (haybales or bleachers), and in the end it’ s over a $7,000 propisition. Given that many single weekend events have entertainment budgets under $10,000 that leaves only trace amounts for everything else (stage acts, musicians, court, and all the rest).

The Village Blacksmith is one of my favorite smithing acts/setups I’ve ever seen, but they went from an old expense of about $500 a weekend to $1500 and up. It doesn’t seem to really dawn on them that it’s not a personal expression of disliking them – it’s just that they no longer fit into the bigger picture of event expenses.

The West Coast is lucky (in some ways) to have 20+ faires a season, with three of them being long run events. But with all the entertainment options, the quality of events often suffers due to attendence numbers that just aren’t what they once were (or are in other areas of the country). It’ll take some time to sort out what new attractions, marketing, and efforts will draw in more audience. It’s even more critical now that the economy continues to be delicate (to say the least), and people in general have less discretionary funds to play with in going to events.

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By now if you’re reading this post, you’ve already heard about the stunt that the tech gizmo blogging site, Gizmodo, pulled at CES this week. A doodad called TV-B-Gone had fallen into the dolt’s hands, and they had the bright idea to wander around turning off every TV in sight. Now at CES, that’s about every few inches (literally).

Now there’s no debate that CES is a big assed event, with bells and whistles all over the place, rather like the Oscars but for the high tech industry. It’s snobbish, and thinks very highly of itself. What shocks the hell out of me is how many people think that intentionally ruining presentations is a good idea (and in fact rather funny). I would have thought more of the tech community, but obviously perhaps the bloggers aren’t as mature as a community as they’d like to think themselves.

A number of postings all commented that it’s obviously not like pouring a drink over a keyboard, since there’s no physical damage that came from the act. However what they’re failing to see is that the point isn’t that a TV was simply turned off; the point is that people who’s jobs are on the lines (if not the presenters, then the techs who are already frazzled of keeping things running in that environment having system failures). The Motorola attack (yes, boys and girls, it was an attack) was during a press conference – which can directly impact revenues by reporters writing about the ineptitude of the presentation; that gets taken up by partners and clients, and decisions are made. Don’t they get that at it’s core, CES is about those kinds of impressions and deals.

The same people would [probably] have some pause at firing off an air horn at a wedding or a funeral, and this is hardly any different. So we’ve heard that CES will deny them access next year. I truly hope that legal action is also taken by one or more of the companies. This is exactly the kind of thing that needs to have a prescedent set for – Brian Lam should lose a good deal of money, and hopefully a house or two. Something that teaches him that he doesn’t get to pick when vandalism is ok, or endangering other people’s jobs is a good idea.

What would he even think if anyone does or did lose their jobs over this? Would he even lose a wink of sleep? If he’s got something against the CES brass, then have the balls to step up and be honest about it – stand out front and Picket the event, hand out flyers, whatever seems prudent to get his point across. Not hurting those people who’s very livelyhoods may hang in the balance with his stunt.

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