Author: Staffing report

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Union Says Staffing Suit Could Cost $10 Million

A group of hotel workers in Indianapolis sued staffing firm Hospitality Staffing Solutions LLC of Atlanta and 10 hotels in Indianapolis claiming wage and hour violations. Unite Here, a union, reports the potential liability in the case is $10 million in back pay.

The lawsuit claims workers were regularly not paid for all hours worked and were not paid required overtime.

Fourteen workers were listed as named plaintiffs in the complaint. The lawsuit seeks class action status.

Hospitality Staffing has contracts with the 10 hotels to provide housekeeping and food service staff, according to the lawsuit. Workers in the suit include housekeepers, banquet servers, cooks, bussers and other food service employees, according to the lawsuit.

Hotels at which they work include Embassy Suites Downtown, the Indianapolis Marriott Downtown, the Canterbury Hotel, the Westin Indianapolis, the Hyatt Regency Indianapolis, JW Marriott Hotel, the Hyatt Place Indianapolis Airport Hotel, The Holiday Inn Select Airport Hotel, the Conrad Indianapolis and the Omni Severin.

The union claims in a press release that hotel workers in Indianapolis are among the lowest paid in the nation with wages starting at $7.25 an hour with few or no benefits.

Filed by Staffing Industry Analysts, a sister company of Workforce Management. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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Survey Reveals Slight Climb in Full-Time Hiring

Twenty-three percent of employers surveyed plan to hire full-time, permanent employees in 2012, according to CareerBuilder’s annual job forecast. The percentage of employers planning to hire is relatively unchanged from 24 percent for 2011 and up from 20 percent for 2010.

Seven percent of employers expect to decrease headcount, the same percentage as did for 2011, and an improvement from 9 percent for 2010.

Fifty-nine percent anticipate no change in their staff levels. Eleven percent are unsure whether there will be change.

The survey also charted four trends to watch in 2012:

Compensation getting more competitive for skilled positions

Sixty-two percent of employers plan to increase compensation for their existing employee base while 32 percent will offer higher starting salaries for new employees. The greatest increases in compensation at organizations in 2012 are those tied to revenue generation, including sales, information technology, engineering and business development.

Voluntary turnover on the rise

Thirty-four percent of human resource managers reported that voluntary turnover at their organizations rose in 2011. Employers pointed to the desire for higher compensation and feeling over-worked as the top two reasons employees gave for resigning.

Employers bridging the skills gap by training

There is an increasing number of areas where demand for skilled positions is growing much faster than supply. Thirty-eight percent plan to train people who don’t have experience in their particular industry and hire them for positions within their organizations in 2012.

Employers targeting Hispanic workers, African American workers and women

Twenty-nine percent of employers said they will be diversity-focused when recruiting in an effort to expand their employee demographics. Twenty percent will be recruiting Hispanics and African Americans to work for their organizations while the same percentage will be recruiting more women. Forty-four percent plan to hire bilingual workers in 2012.

This survey was conducted online within the U.S. by Harris Interactive on behalf of CareerBuilder among 3,023 hiring managers and human resource professionals between Nov. 9, 2011, and Dec. 5, 2011.

Filed by Staffing Industry Analysts, a sister company of Workforce Management. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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Survey: Crowd Sourcing a Second Job for Many

Crowd sourcing may be a second job for many, according to a new survey. Almost three-quarters of workers on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk online crowd sourcing site have jobs outside of the site, according to the survey by CrowdControl.

Crowd sourcing can involve breaking up a large task such as validating data or translation into many small tasks and farming them out to numerous workers online instead of hiring a single worker or small number of workers to do the single large task. Mechanical Turk follows this model.

CrowdControl also found in its survey that 21 percent of Mechanical Turk workers actually perform jobs on the site while at their regular day job. However, 77 percent do tasks at home, sometimes in between video games. Of workers with day jobs, 36 percent earn a salary of more than $50,000 annually and 61 percent have college degrees.

CrowdControl, a separate firm from Amazon.com, provides quality assurance software for crowd sourcing.

Filed by Staffing Industry Analysts, a sister company of Workforce Management. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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IBM Announces Vendor Management System Acquisition

International Business Machines Corp. announced a deal to buy Emptoris Inc., a contract management software company whose products include a vendor management system for contingent labor.

Terms of the transaction were not announced. Emptoris is owned by Marlin Equity Partners.

Emptoris’ VMS ranked as the third largest VMS in terms of statement of work spend and as the largest in terms of outsourced service contract spend, according to the 2011 VMS and MSP Supplier Competitive Landscape report by Staffing Industry Analysts.

The acquisition is part of IBM’s “Smarter Commerce” initiative begun in March 2011 and aimed at helping companies respond to shifting customer buying patterns.

“Procurement is being asked to show how it can deliver value to the organization,” said Craig Hayman, general manager of industry solutions at IBM. “Adding Emptoris strengthens the comprehensive capabilities we deliver and enables IBM to meet the specific needs of chief procurement officers.”

Emptoris has more than 350 customers in 75 countries and is based in Burlington, Massachusetts.

The acquisition is anticipated to close in the first quarter of 2012.

Emptoris’ staffing VMS at one time was part of a firm called Click Commerce Inc., a portion of which was acquired by Emptoris in 2009. At the time, Click Commerce’s VMS ranked as the largest with $4.64 billion in spend, according to Staffing Industry Analysts. Emptoris had acquired the pieces of Click Commerce from Illinois Tool Works Inc.

In 2006, Click Commerce had paid $15 million in cash and stock for VMS technology from Elance Inc., a Mountain View, California-based firm that now provides services for companies and individuals seeking to hire independent contractors online.

Filed by Staffing Industry Analysts, a sister company of Workforce Management. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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Hotel Chain Sues Search Firm for $5 Million

A hospitality industry executive search firm that was sued by a New York hotel operator in a lawsuit seeking $5 million in punitive damages said the allegations in the lawsuit are false.

Amsterdam Hospitality Group had sued Marshall-Alan Associates, alleging the firm recruited workers for the hotel operator but later recruited the workers away to other companies in an effort to generate more fees.

“We only recently received the complaint which was a complete surprise, considering Marshall-Alan had terminated our relationship with Amsterdam Hospitality Group over a year ago,” Alan Massarsky, president of Marshall-Alan Associates said in a statement.

“Marshall-Alan is renowned as one of the best hospitality executive search firms in the industry, and has nearly 30 years of experience working with some of the most exclusive hotel companies in the world,” Massarsky said. “At this point I can only say that the allegations are false and we look forward to fully defending these claims on their merits.”

Filed by Staffing Industry Analysts, a sister company of Workforce Management. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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