Newsletter July 2020

Recruiters for the Copier Channel® for more than 30 years, Copier Careers® has been the only recruiting firm exclusively dedicated to connecting Copier Channel employers with experienced service technicians, copier sales representatives, sales managers, service & operations managers, controllers, support staff, and MPS/MNS experts. Start your month off right with Newsletter July 2020: Copier Channel news and career advice. Search copier jobs now.

IN THIS MONTH’S NEWSLETTER

Encouraging Increases in June Employment Rate
Xerox Alleged Maze Ransomware Victim
Sound Off: How are you doing?
Poll-of-the-Month: What is your current employment Status?

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Encouraging Increases in June Employment Rate

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics released encouraging data in the June Employment Situation Summary for 2020. The US unemployment rate declined to 11.1%, down 2.2 percentage points. US employment rose by 4.8 million in June, compared to May’s increase of 2.7 million. 

This encouraging 7.5 million-person gain reflects “a partial resumption of economic activity that had been curtailed due to the coronavirus pandemic in April and March, when employment fell by a total of 22.2 million in the 2 months combined.” That leaves 14.7 million more people to employ in order to return to pre-COVID levels recorded in February.

The biggest gains have been in the leisure and hospitality sector (which also suffered the greatest losses) but professional and business services added 306,000 jobs in June.

The quality of employment also improved in the last month. The number of full-time employees working part-time hours due to economic reasons dropped by 1.6 million in June to 9.1 million people. This number is still more than double what we saw in February but June’s increase is a good sign.

While the nation has plenty of recovery work ahead, the increased re-employment rate affirms what we have been seeing for weeks – employers are starting to hire again!

We think it is particularly important to highlight these recovery signs because it is so easy to be discouraged during stressful times. There is a perception among some candidates that we talk to that there are just no jobs out there and they shouldn’t even bother looking. The US BLS reports that just about the only employment number that hasn’t changed is the number of “discouraged workers.” The number of people “who believed that no jobs were available for them, numbered 681,000 in June, essentially unchanged from the previous month.”

For those of you who are stressed, frustrated and disheartened – we hear you and we want to help! We are seeing national and industry-specific employment gains and we have reason to believe these numbers will continue to increase. Now is the time to be updating your resume, reconnecting with your network, browsing our job board and jumping on your job search.

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In the market for a new job? Our job board features hundreds of copier jobs with top employers, updated daily. Search jobs now.

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Xerox Alleged Maze Ransomware Victim

According to BleepingComputer, Maze ransomware claims to have captured 100GB of Xerox data as of June 25th. Xerox has yet to confirm this cyberattack but Maze is offering 10 screenshots of Xerox files as proof of breach.

“Specifically, one image shows that hosts on ‘eu.xerox.net,’ managed by Xerox Corporation, were compromised. Systems on other domains might also be impacted.” If true, Maze is demanding Xerox negotiate payment to regain access to their encrypted files.

If Xerox fails to pay, the ransomware group is threatening to publish this stolen data online. Given Xerox’s size, industry importance, close ties to other businesses, and the many examples of financial and corporate drama in the past few years, the publication of this data could be shattering.

Read more about Maze ransomware…

Read more news from around the industry on our News & Resources page.

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Sound Off

Our readers respond to last month’s poll question

Since March we’ve all been struggling to deal with the many changes the pandemic has brought to our lives. In past polls we’ve asked how COVID was affecting your work life and what changes to you expect to see as businesses reopen. This time we just wanted to know how you’re coping. And we were very happy to hear from so many of you – we had a record-breaking 18,982 votes this month!

It should come as no surprise that most (36%) just want a return to normalcy. Another 21% and struggling but hanging in there. In a close third, 18% said they’re safe for now but they’re not fine. Another 15% are keeping it positive, saying they’re good so far. But the remaining 10% are not good and having a hard time. And we had a few  (59) votes for our jokingly oblivious answer. So that’s 72% coping as best they can, 18% closer to the edge, and 10% really struggling.

We have a ton of comments this month so we included as many as we could below to show how varying everyone’s coping experience has been.

Our July poll question also invites you to clarify or update us on your employment situation so be sure to vote and comment. We’d like to compare the  industry-specific employment data we collect this month to the monthly national data if we can get a useful sample size. If you’d like to see that analysis too, please encourage your industry contacts to weigh in!

POLL QUESTION: