merci
Merci beaucoup.
Je dois rendre le travail vendredi 9 janvier.
Je te rappelle les questions:
- Explain in your own words what Labor Ready's consists in. (80 words)
- For what reasons is the company in trouble today? (80 words)
- translate into franch frome 'Another problem is that injuries...' down to '...intentional misclassification'.
voici le texte en anglais:
AMERICA'S BLUE COLLAR TEMPS IN A DITCH
Amid the "new economy" of the 1990s, Glenn Welstad and John Coghlan made their mark in an age-old, bricks-and-mortar business. The company they built, Labor Ready, was quickly named the "McDonald's of day labor" and remains America's only national firm devoted to placing blue-collar temps. But like so many other successful companies, Labor Ready has fallen on hard times - and recession is only partly to blame.
The firm recruits workers from unemployment offices, homeless shelters and through word-of-mouth, then sells their labour at a market-up rate to public agencies and private companies, raging from tiny businesses to Wal-Mart. Workers typically get the minimum wage for hard physical labour: digging ditches, tossing boxes and performing unskilled, often dangerous construction work.
By 2000, Labor Ready had 700,000 temps on its books and annual revenues of almost 1 billion of dollar. Yet its profit margin, once 3.3% of sales, is now a paltry 1% and the firm's share price, over 24 dollars in 1996, has fallen to 5 dollars.
What went wrong? The recession has taken a big bite out of the firm's businness. To some extent, though, Labor Ready has been a victim of its own success, expolding from 200 branch offices in 1996 to more than 800 in 2001. Then in 1998, Labor Ready replaced most local sales staff with a centralised telemarketing system. In a business in which sucess depends largely on customer relations, this was not a smart move.
Labor Ready's troubles may suggest a more fundamental limitation of day labour. Even when demand is healthy, making profits at the bottom of the labour market can be tough. Agencies cannot price blue-collar labour much above the minimum wage. "Pick-a-shovel labour is and has always been a comodity. If agencies price it too high, the clients will say we'll do it ourselves," says Mr Gunther.
Another problem is that injuries are widespread in the job that Labor Ready's workers do.Some 10,000 of its temps were hurt while working last year. Workers' compensation can quickly eat into revenues. The firm's insurance costs rose sharply when auditors from Washingtonsate handed Labor Ready a 734,000 dollars bill for underpayement of preniums to the stae -run workers ' compensation system. The company is appealing but is under investigation, in twenty states, for alleged underpayments caused by misclassifying constructionjobs as clerical or other positions in which accidents are fewer and insurance rates lower. Company officials insist that there has been no intenttional misclassification.
At a time when the day-labour market has become fiercely competitive and overserved, Labor Ready's best days may be behind it.