There was anger today as BMW confirmed that 850 jobs were being cut by ending weekend working at its Mini car plant near Oxford. The cuts will mostly affect agency workers when they come into force from 2 March when the plant begins operating five days a week, instead of the current seven. Union sou...

Unemployment in Britain climbed nearer the 2 million mark in January as it soared to its highest level since 1997. The Office for National Statistics said today the wider ILO measure of unemployment, which also counts those seeking work but not claiming benefit, rose to 1.971 million in the three mo...

Today is a really difficult day for my colleagues in Mxxxx_t (specially those who are in the US). For purposes of privacy policy, I would not write the details here in my blog (you would probably hear it in the news anyway).  Being safe from the first wave of lay off is not an assurance that I will...

I see that the BBC’s iPM blog is asking for the human stories behind the current unemployment figures. Well, I am a human face of two recent news stories. As readers are no doubt sick of reading by now, one of those stories was the loss of around 27,000 jobs at Woolworths. The other is the sho...

Your computer crashes. It won’t start up again. What do you do? Nothing productive. The morning’s wasted, the technician comes and tells you that you need a new hard drive, and your afternoon’s gone too while you go shopping for a new one. There are a million variations of this sce...

I have no posts in 2008 labeled "Goals." None. Of course, according to my final post about 2007, I didn't set goals. I made plans. Let's see how I did: Exercise I did very well through May, when I got swamped with work. From May through August I occasionally missed my goal of 2.5 hours per week, and...

I'm not going to use the term 'uncertain' and link it with 'times' because enough crap is unfolding around the corporate traps. Like all other major cities, Sydney has experienced a financial exodus, with a large number of financial jobs made redundant. At the company I work at, I expected to be mad...

Everyone is in an uproar over the economic crisis. These are hard times for masters of the universe declares Joan Collins....

More than 30,000 retail jobs were at risk last night as Woolworths fought to avoid collapse and the fashion discount chain MK One crashed into administration for the second time in a year. Woolworths' future was hanging in the balance after its bankers objected to a management rescue plan to sell th...

I've avoided using the R word these past few weeks as everyone I seem to talk to is extremely busy - could be the tidal surge before the financial storm, hard for me to answer right now on a personal level as I'm no money expert to be honest. But it is still slightly concerning. I think, though, tha...