Another Job Update

Interesting turn of events. This morning, the advertising for mine and Mike's jobs was removed from the Eaton job website. Butch was finally given the go ahead to tell us officially that the contract had not been renewed with Eaton. As it turns out, ATS treats it's employees like temp employees. When you hire in you have to sign a contract stating that you will not go to work for the company you were contracted to work with even if ATS loses the contract without ATS being paid a finders-fee by that company. Currently, ATS is trying to decide how much, if any fee they will charge to allow Eaton to hire us once the contract expires. It's some kind of non-competition clause that I think is bullshit because ATS has nothing to offer us in this area as far as work is concerned. The nearest locations where they might possibly have positions available are in Greeneville, SC or East TN. In the quarterly staff meeting this morning, Mike brought up the fact that the contract with ATS would end at the end of April and that it had not been renewed. He let them know what we knew of the situation. The plant manager was in the meeting and stated that he would do what it took to make sure that we would be able to apply for these jobs without any legal ramifications. Now, it's just a waiting game for us to find out what's going on since ATS never tells us about anything.

It's my personal opinion that someone from ATS at one of the plants got in touch with ATS corporate and told them that positions were already posted as available. Because of this, the site managers for ATS were allowed to inform their IT employees that the contract was not renewed. I'm also assuming that Scott requested the job postings be taken down and not reposted until ATS informed us of the contract status and made a decision on whether or not they would wave the non-competition clause in their contracts. Personally, I'm inclined to go ahead and apply for the job when it is reposted no matter what ATS decides. Right now, I'm not very please with them as a company and neither is Mike. They've kept us out of the loop in several things that would impact our jobs and I seriously doubt that they would have allowed the site managers to inform us of the contract status until the end of March if the Arden IT jobs hadn't already been posted. Mike e-mailed them repeatedly stating that if something wasn't done soon we would lose the contract. All he got as a reply was "You're doing a good job, keep up the great work!"

Waiting, waiting, waiting...Guess I should get back to work and see what I can get done today. Just not real motivated to do anything right now. Until I know something about this officially though, I'm going to start cutting back on spending which will cut out a lot of extra activities I've been doing. Going to start saving as much as possible in case ATS doesn't wave the clause and leaves Mike and I hanging in the wind without jobs. That way I'll have a little bit to tide me over until I can get my business of the ground again.