I work within the UK construction industry for an engineering firm and we too are cutting back.  We are also regularly hearing news on the grape-vine of other companies within the industry making redundancies etc.  We have been told to expect it to affect our area of work by approximately 50% before things start to look better.

It's not a nice position to be in and we are hoping the cuts we have made will be sufficient to see us through (fingers crossed) but you never can tell.

As a company we are trying to remain positive and look to the future by updating our systems and procedures in the hope that we have solid foundations in place when thing begin to get better (whenever that may be)

I agree that, in the current climate, jobs are very thin on the ground and the number of candidates applying for the positions is on the rise which doesn't help.  I also think that prior to the crunch there were a lot of people applied for admin roles to pay the bills because they were able to turn a computer on and didn't know what else to do, however that's a whole other topic of conversation.