52 jobs axed as industrial coating specialist goes under
Staffordshire-based specialist Industrial Coating Services has fallen into administration with the loss of 52 jobs.
ICS, which specialised in the surface preparation and application of protective coatings, suffered from critical cash flow issues arising from a sustained period of working on loss-making contracted work.
Since last year ICS was working on the major Wandsworth Bridge refurbishment in London which is now due to be completed next summer after further additional critical works were identified on the structure.
The original contract with VolkerLaser is understood to have been secured for around £3m.
The business, which operated from an industrial paint shop building in Rugeley, was marketed for sale prior to the administrators’ appointment, but a buyer could not be found.
Ben Jones from administrators FRP Advisory , said: “Without significant investment or the prospect of new ownership, ICS was unable to trade through its difficulties and continue as a going concern.
“All trading and operations have ceased. Regrettably, all of the 52 employees have been made redundant, although a small number will continue to support the administrators with their statutory duties. ”
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Building collapses after foundation blunders
A building contractor has been prosecuted after carrying out unsafe excavation works which resulted in the partial collapse of a residential building.
Manchester Crown Court heard how on 14 August 2019, Iproject Cheshire Limited had been carrying out refurbishment works on a building in Didsbury.
Employees of the company undermined the foundations while digging out the ground around the building causing a partial collapse. There were no injuries or fatalities, but the collapse presented a risk to life.
An HSE investigation found that the company failed to properly plan or carry out the work safely. A risk assessment into the excavations had not been carried out. There was no safe system of work in place and the work had not been sufficiently supervised.
Iproject Cheshire Limited of Stockport pleaded guilty to safety breaches and was fined £31,500 and ordered to pay costs of £13,500.
Speaking after the hearing, HSE inspector David Argument said: “This was a very serious incident, and it is fortunate that nobody was injured as a result of it.
“This incident could have been prevented if the company had carried out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment prior to commencing work on the excavations and by properly supervising the work.”
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A Simple Clear Construction Staffing Distress Indicator
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Well before the pandemic, the construction sector was worrying over what was perceived as an acute shortage of labor. Much of the discussion on this topic over the past several years has been anecdotal. Or reference has been made to employment gains that have been less than they should be and unemployment rates that have sometimes turned spectacularly low.
But it would be better to find some easy-to-understand visual representation of the problem. It’s my hope that Graphs 1 through 5 below, making use of JOLTS data, fit the bill.
From the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), for ‘all jobs’ and 14 major sub-sectors, I’ve taken ‘openings’ levels and ‘hires’ levels and calculated openings-to-hires ratios for every month back to July 2009, which was the first period of recovery after the ‘fiscal crisis’ recession (a.k.a., the Great Recession).
The openings-to-hires ratio essentially captures the degree to which vacant positions are being snapped up (a low ratio) or going begging (a high ratio).
To enable easy comparisons between industries, I’ve indexed their openings-to-hires ratios.
The indexing I’ve adopted takes the July 2009 value for each series and sets it equal to 100.0. (The number could just as easily be set equal to 1.0 but choosing 100 leaves more room for following numbers to move not only up, but also down, should that become the case.)
For each series, the value of each subsequent month is divided by the value in the base month (July 2009) and multiplied by 100.
Since all the series have the same starting value (July 2009 = 100.0), when a couple of them, or several of them, are shown on a graph, their movements over time can be readily compared.
In Graphs 1 through 5, I’ve stuck with only one-on-one comparisons.
The higher the curve, the greater the sought-after employee shortage distress.
From Graph 1, it’s apparent that the increase over time, since July 2009, in the openings-to-hires ratio for construction has far outpaced the increase in the openings-to-hires ratio for ‘all jobs’. (The openings-to-hires ratio will increase in an expanding economy.)
By the way, I must point out that the patterns apparent in Graphs 1 to 5 stay essentially the same even when the base period is shifted (e.g., if January 2015 is chosen = 100.0 rather than July 2009).
In Graphs 2 through 5, the worker shortage in construction is shown to be more severe than in the following: manufacturing; retail trade; transportation, warehousing, and utilities; and accommodation and food services.
As for nine of the other ten industrial sectors not set out graphically below, construction’s labor shortage is far more acute than in any of them except one.
The worst labor shortage in the U.S. is currently being experienced in another goods-producing as opposed to the services-producing corner of the economy, ‘mining and logging’.
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