You might get lucky and find work from home but it won't be easy. You could try wading through the many sites offering advice and opinion on the dire job situation. The Wall Street Journal looks at short employment stints, employment test cheating and who's especially vulnerable to layoffs; Lindsey Pollak offers tips to students and others on tips landing a first job. There are lawyers to help older workers avert discriminatory layoffs and a job bank for people over 50. There are, of course, many job search sites, some better than others. Some are avoiding search engines and going directly to Facebook or Linked In to make connections with potential recruiters. [more inside]
posted by etaoin on Jan 12, 2009 - 27 comments

Doing More With Less: In Defense of Creative Loafing I’ve been on unemployment three times in the past six years. Each time was better than the last, and each time I stayed on until the last cent was exhausted. I didn’t even try to get a job; it was a paid vacation. This is somewhat unusual from what I can tell. There’s a deep vein of antipathy in this country toward collecting checks from the government, especially in precincts that tend to skew rightward. Politicians imply that it’s un-American for an individual to milk the government, all while jacking up corporate welfare for their campaign contributors. And your uncle who cheered at the end of Easy Rider? He insists that if he had to obliterate 40 years of his life punching a clock, why should you goddamn hippies have it any better?
posted by jason's_planet on Mar 11, 2008 - 107 comments

Never wanna work/Always wanna play/Pleasure, pleasure every day. What happens when the jobs go away and don't return? Should we take the surpluses generated and pay people not to work? What happens to the assumption of scarcity when nanotechology allows us to generate potentially anything we want from grass clippings? Maybe Marx had it wrong all along. Maybe, instead of fetishizing work and the authoritarian mindset that it generates, we should have been reading Paul Lafargue instead. Just as a thought experiment, what would you do if your job category disappeared? How would you spend your time? Would you invest more time and energy in friendships and other relationships? Hobbies? If you were your employer, what technologies would you use to get rid of your position and save money?
posted by jason's_planet on Jun 25, 2006 - 43 comments

Facing Serial Unemployment, it's Time for a New Game Plan. Anyone else frustrated with jobs that disappear out from under them? What is the "new game plan" that works? (Say an unemployed person realizes that these Boston Globe articles disappear just as fast as their jobs do. In solidarity with other unemployed workers, they violate copyright and cache this article on a website. Do we prosecute?)
posted by sheauga on Jul 19, 2002 - 4 comments