According to a recent headline in Bloomberg, Stagnant August Hiring in U.S. May Signal Renewed Recession, the numbers don’t look promising.
The article quotes James Hamilton, an economics professor at the University of California, San Diego who has studied what has led to previous economic downturns in the United States. Hamilton warned:
“At this stage of the typical expansion we expect above-average growth and instead we are barely seeing any growth at all. We have to be more worried. Overall, the economy is in a delicate position and another shock could send us down.”
Julia Coronado, the chief economist for North America at BNP Paribas, also offered a grim forecast for the US economy. Predicting that the economy will drop at a 2 percent annual rate during the last quarter of 2011, she stated:
“September could mark the start of the slump. When there are no jobs and no income, there will not be a lot of spending either.”
With the latest job growth number at zero, it looks as though we might be in stall mode Read more » about Racing Into an Uncertain Future in Construction
Two weeks ago, 2000 high school students participated in the Dallas ISD Districtwide College Fair, an event which included information to prepare students for college as well as information to prepare interested students in workforce careers. The Career Education and Workforce Partnerships division of the Dallas Independent School District sponsored various “career clusters”, providing information about various careers available for students to pursue. The Dallas division of Marek Brothers Systems represented the Architecture & Construction industry and sponsored a booth for that cluster. Two of their former workforce development trainees who are now supervisors in the company shared the benefits of the Marek workforce 
development program to the participants. Harold Curry, Safety Manager for Marek Brothers in Dallas, provided photos taken at the event for this blog post.
This saying was hanging in the bathroom of the facility where we were working at a recent planning session for a contractor’s leadership team.
I grew up in the Bob Dylan era, and his songs are still relevant today. In the late 60s when he was first popular, we were in an unpopular war, there was developing uncertainty in the economy and we all knew that change was in the air, whether on the jobsite, on the streets of Chicago or in the Deep South.
The following is excerpted from a letter written by Stan Marek, CEO of the Marek Family of Companies in Houston, in response to 
According to press releases from the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida in recent weeks, two separate contractors have each been convicted of issuing corporate checks to fictitious companies, cashing those checks at local check cashing stores, and then using the cash to pay their workers “off the books” without collecting and reporting employment taxes and without paying the workers overtime pay.
As part of the upcoming jobs push by the Administration there is one item of particular interest to those of us in the industry: the renewal of the Federal Highway Act that is set to expire on September 30 unless Congress takes action to extend it again.
