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Marce Edwards is the business editor. She has been at The News Tribune for seven years and has written about technology and big businesses in the South Sound including Weyerhaeuser and Russell. Before moving to Tacoma, she worked at The Idaho Statesman in Boise. She is a Northwest native who likes to garden and refuses to use an umbrella. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and two kids.
C.R. Roberts is a Tacoma native. Before joining The News Tribune, he worked as a freelance writer and part-time cowhand on a cattle ranch in Northern Idaho. He writes about small business, personal finance and other business issues.
John Gillie writes about the aerospace and airline industries, commercial development and consumer issues. During his 30-year-tenure at The News Tribune he has covered issues as diverse as the Native American fishing rights disputes, crime and the courts, the wood products industry and energy. He lived in Tacoma with his family for 25 years, but now lives in Kent because his wife heads a five-state non-profit foundation headquartered in Ballard, and it only seemed a sensible compromise to make considering their workplaces are 40 miles apart.
Kelly Kearsley has been a business reporter at The News Tribune since 2005. She covers the Port of Tacoma and international trade. Being born and raised in Spokane she’s used to living in cities with inferiority complexes and, in fact, prefers it. Prior to working at The News Tribune, she spent three years as a reporter for The Bulletin in Bend, Oregon and another year working stints for The Associated Press and Seattle Times. She graduated from Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and miniature schnauzer.
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Tacoma temporary staffing provider TrueBlue Inc. stayed profitable in the third quarter despite a 27 percent revenue drop compared with the third quarter of 2008.
The company today announced net income of $8.2 million for the quarter ending Sept. 25. That's 19 cents a share.
That income is about half the $16.3 million or 38 cents per share the staffing company made in the same quarter last year.
Revenues were $284.8 million compared with $387.9 million for the same period in 2008.
"Our strict cost management combined with ongoing stabilization in the same branch revenue drove our results this quarter," said TrueBlue Chief Executive Steve Cooper. The company's ongoing efforts to reduce is workers compensation costs also helped keep the company in the black, he said. TrueBlue has reduced workplace injuries by 60 percent over the last six years.
The downtown Tacoma-headquartered company has closed 155 branch offices and cut company-wide employment from 3,300 to less than 2,600 since the first of the year.
Management has trimmed other expenses by 30 percent, he said.
The company's results were about six cents a share better than its own predictions, said Chief Financial Officer Derrek Gafford. That improvement was the result of better-than-expected revenues, particularly from a single large customer whose need for temporary staffing has continued longer than expected.
The company's economy measures, said Cooper, have left TrueBlue, parent company of such brands as Labor Ready, Spartan Staffing, CLP Resources, Plane Techs and TLC, well-positioned to benefit from any upswing in business once business activity increases.
The company is beginning to see some freshening of demand in the Midwest where auto parts suppliers are ramping up their factories.
"It really started with Cash for Clunkers, but it's continued on after that," said Cooper.
The construction industry, a major source of demand for temporary help, is still ailing, company officials said.
The startup of some federal stimulus-funded projects will begin happening late this year and early next, said Cooper. Those projects may stimulate demand for more workers.
Those stimulus projects have been slower to leave the starting line than the government had hoped, but with preliminary planning and permitting done, they should begin moving forward, he said.
