Thursday, August 26, 2010

August Blues


It's Thursday and the only job this week was my eavesdropping sortie early Monday morning. When I started contracting my services to the Boss three years ago, he had ten drivers on the roster, seven of whom were full-time equivalent. Now we are three and a half drivers, sharing what amounts to work for one.

We are contractors because Boss man is allergic to full-time jobs. They create Social Security and payroll tax obligations, and obligations don't sit well with him. So we drivers are all self-employed, or, as I like to call us, minimum wage contractors. What the IRS does to us would be banned under Geneva Treaty protocols, but it is what it is.

The flip side of that coin is that The Boss would be out of business right about now if he had full-timers. Every facet of the business is down, from the airport transfers to drunken party nights. Granted, we live in a small market, but it's a wealthy community that has become averse to spending. Here on the Gulf Coast of Florida everyone's confidence was based for decades on rising real estate prices. When that bubble burst, a lot of well-paid jobs went with it, and as the economy goes, so goes the limo business, only more so.

As ever, necessity is the mother of invention. There is no making a decent living driving, and unlikely to be one for the forseeable future, so everyone has to adapt. That's how I'm spending all my time lately, working a couple of different plans, happy to take the crumbs when The Boss offers them.




Benz roadster from here [link]

2 comments:

Don said...

Jeez, that's terrible. Sarasota is a very wealthy area, I wouldn't hae thought that people would have stopped using your services. Good luck keeping the wolf from the door.

Wombat said...

Thanks, Don. Yeah, it's a brutal thing. The whole Gulf Coast has been brutally cut down, with no hope for any kind of quick recovery.

Luckily, I have a couple of other avenues that are beginning to work. But it's the survival of the hardest and smartest out there.