Menu

There’s little doubt that the current economic environment is fostering fear and uncertainty in the workplace, especially regarding changing jobs. Results of an ongoing survey by MRINetwork, one of the world’s largest search and recruitment organizations, revealed that employees are just as likely to be looking for a new job today as they were two years ago.

With a recession at hand, HR departments face increasing pressure to make the correct decision when evaluating new hires and ensuring that their internal hiring and immigration processing systems and associated expenses are under control. While the continued economic downturn will reduce hiring across the board, many companies still will require international workers for hard-to-fill openings including IT programmers, design engineers, doctors, nurses and other highly specialized positions. Now, more than ever, organizations must implement efficient hiring and immigration processing systems in order to optimize productivity and cost-effectiveness.

The highly competitive industrial environment coupled with the impact of economic crisis is forcing companies across all sectors to re-assess their budget spending and improve their overall efficiency to stay competitive and maintain profit margins. The move towards adopting wireless solutions could be an effective solution to reduce costs and improve plant efficiency if wireless technology is understood and adopted for the right application areas.

By 2013, Ericsson anticipates that there will be some 6.5 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world, compared to today's 3.7 billion. About 90 percent of growth is expected to come from developing markets where more than half of the population lives outside city limits. To build mobile networks in rural areas with no or unreliable power grid means that the power challenge must be solved.

comScore, Inc. released its rankings of the largest and fastest-growing Internet properties and site categories in Japan for October 2008, based on data from the comScore World Metrix audience measurement service. Business/finance sites saw visitation growth in October due to the global financial crisis, while retail sites saw gains due to the upcoming holiday shopping season and seasonal purchases.

Between 2000 and 2007, the value of EU27 exports to Brazil grew more slowly than imports, leading to an increasing EU27 deficit in trade with Brazil, from 1.8 billion euro in 2000 to 11.5 bn in 2007. In the first nine months of 2008, the value of EU27 exports to Brazil rose to 19.5 bn compared with 15.4 bn in the first nine months of 2007, and imports increased to 26.8 bn from 23.7 bn. As a result, the EU27 trade deficit with Brazil fell slightly, reaching 7.3 bn in the first nine months of 2008, compared with 8.4 bn in the same period of 2007.

The European automotive industry will continue to contribute to the ambitious European energy and climate change strategy and is ready to meet the CO2 legislation for passenger cars, endorsed by the European Parliament.

Federal regulators issued credit card rules today that take a significant and welcome step to curb some of the industry's most unfair and abusive practices. Unfortunately, implementation of the rules won't take effect for 18 months and, in several key respects, don't go far enough to protect consumers.

The number of companies implementing cost-cutting measures, including layoffs, hiring and salary freezes and smaller pay raises, has risen sharply in just two months, according to a new survey by Watson Wyatt.

Food banks across America are reporting a 30 percent increase in requests for emergency food assistance, according to a new survey conducted by Feeding America, the nation's largest hunger relief organization. At the same time, a new public opinion poll released by the organization finds that many Americans are unable to provide adequate amounts of nutritious food to their families, due to the current economic crisis.