Where are we going?

Of course I’m not the first one to discover a crisis is going on, that worldwide banks experience difficulties and so on.
In order to explain the situation, I need to write a note mainly for North Amercian readers, I guess.
In most of Europe, and definetly in France and Italy, you cannot simply “lose your job”. Once you’re past the junior stage, you have a “permanent” contract, and unless you do something very serious, they can’t fire you. I know Americas usually find this weird, but if you see it from the worker side, this is absolutly great.

Anyway, even though the crisis has fully hit down here, we still thought that we would have work to do, probably because my tream is still recovering from the last job and the 7 weeks spent on work leave.
Apparently we were wrong. We all knew that corporate companies would stop M&A deals for a while, but we were confident that Private Equities would instead take advantage of the situation. This would have given us enough work for the following 5 or 6 months.
Instead, today the partner told us that he has already called most of our PE clients, and they are all out of cash, so they don’t consider any deal at the moment. Since the banks are not making any loan, this means no work for the next few months. UGH.
The partner pretty told us that if some of us should decide to quit the Company, it would be good.

Yeah, great, only who the hell does he think would hire us???

So right now most of my coworkers are wondering what will happen to us. Some actually say that withing 6 months or 1 year our job will disappear, at least in continental Europe.
I don’t think it’s so bad, but who knows really?

On my side, I’m waiting for some news from the Milan office, and meanwhile I managed to have myself staffed on a mission for the Paris office in November. And I really hope this shows some people from my office, that while they have nothing to do, the Paris office WANTS ME TO WORK. Just so that we can make things clear about whose work is considered valuable.