Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Breathing room

So with the elections over with, the hope/prayer/wish/general thinking in the architecture and construction industry is that things should start moving again for us, but probably not until January or February of 2009.  In some jurisdictions, bond initiatives that hospitals and civic projects needed to pass in order to remodel or build anew were on this November’s ballot.  With today’s results, those institutions will now either need time to figure out how the voted-for cash will more specifically be used (or await its accrual), or what to do in place of the cash for which they hoped if the initiative was voted down.  What this means for my industry: some work may be coming back, but it'll take at least a few months for anything to even happen.

My healthcare team had a meeting with Alex a couple of days ago.  Alex said that we hoped not to have to lay off anyone else, but we might have to.  Alternately, if things don't pick up soon enough, we may be asked to cut our hours--to work 32 or 35 hours a week instead of the usual 40.  This is the downside of having a master's degree and being a licensed professional but not being on salary.  That's a good thing when you're working 10 and 20 hours of overtime a week, and sucky when times like this come along.  Oddly enough, we're still getting the day after Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas as paid holidays off.  I guess they're trying to keep the few left behind sorta happy.

Regardless of who won the election, it tells Wall Street and lots of different industries some idea of what to expect.  I talked to my financial advisor today, and he said that also regardless of who had won that we're going to see a lot more government oversight in the coming months of various financial industries, especially the mortgage broker industry.  At any rate, I'm worn out with the passing of Election Day. I watched the results at a bar with a couple of friends and didn't get to bed until midnight.  I'm quietly hopeful, relieved, and cautiously exuberant about the months to come.  We all have a lot of work to do, regardless of our party or line of work, and I know we can do it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I had simialr thoughts that perhaps now that the election is over the private sector might open up a little bit. Since we do mostly private work, it's been pretty slow the past month, and nothing large is on the horizon.

Hopefully things will pick up.