Roaring back: Volkswagen opened a plant in Tennessee last month with 2,000 workers. Honda is hiring 1,000 in Indiana to meet demand for its best-selling Civic. General Motors is looking for 2,500 in Detroit to build the Chevy Volt. Two years after the end of the Great Recession, the auto industry is hiring again—and much faster than the rest of the economy. As an employer, it’s growing faster than airplane manufacturers, shipbuilders, health care providers and the federal government. The hiring spree is even more remarkable because memories of the U.S. auto industry’s near-death experience are fresh. In 2009, General Motors and Chrysler both got government bailouts and entered bankruptcy, and auto sales hit a 30-year low. In June of that year, about 623,000 people were employed by the auto industry in the United States, the fewest since the early 1980s. Now the figure is almost 700,000, a 12% increase.
Fast way to get in touch: Quick on the heels of Google’s launch of its latest social-networking venture, Facebook is rolling out video calls. It’s powered by Internet phone company Skype. Facebook says it is also rolling out a group chat feature. Facebook users can now create instant group chats if they want to quickly message a small group of their friends. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook now has 750 million users. And they share 4 billion things such as photos, links and status updates on the site every day. Google Inc. opened up Google Plus last week on an invite-only basis.
