Welcome to the world of Britain's working poor. The Rowleys belong to a section of society not much mentioned in ministerial and media dispatches. They are neither the very wealthy affected by the 50p tax nor the "squeezed middle" expressing anxiety about child benefit and this week's budget; nor are the Rowleys representative of the long-term unemployed or one of the 120,000 "troubled families" in which the government is investing £448m over the next three years.
[more inside]
posted by modernnomad
on Mar 18, 2012 -
105 comments
The Ropes at Disney's - 1943 Employee Handbook. The good old days when women got twice as much sick leave, the Penthouse club was accessible by "men only! - sorry gals...", and a violation of the U.S. Espionage Act could get you fired.
posted by madamjujujive
on Sep 26, 2011 -
52 comments
LayoffDaily.com -- thoroughly cataloging each day's depressing layoff news, from the
very small companies to the
very large, and updated several times a day. (But there's also a small section of the site devoted to news of companies and government org's that are hiring.)
posted by Asparagirl
on Feb 2, 2009 -
42 comments
A Resume Experiment. In which career blog
JibberJobber responds to a request for resume help by assembling a team of hiring managers and professional resume writers to review the document:
Part 1
: Introduction |
Part 2: First Impressions/Reactions |
Part 3: Formatting the Resume |
Part 4: Content is King |
Part 5: Wrap Up
posted by lalex
on Feb 25, 2008 -
37 comments
Much of the “jobs of the future” rhetoric surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a “post-industrial” economy in which everyone will deal only in abstractions. Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking...
posted by Kwantsar
on Sep 7, 2006 -
54 comments
Ugh... As if working in an office isn't enough. This is
one toy I will NOT be buying for my kid. I get the irony, but man, how depressing would it be to see this under the xmas tree?
posted by mountainmambo
on Dec 16, 2004 -
44 comments
Outsource Your Own Job! -- "Says a programmer on Slashdot.org who outsourced his job: "About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 out of the $67,000 I get. He's happy to have the work. I'm happy that I have to work only 90 minutes a day just supervising the code. My employer thinks I'm telecommuting. Now I'm considering getting a second job and doing the same thing." "
via BBspot.
posted by Space Coyote
on Aug 23, 2004 -
23 comments
Tax Man Bush says tax cuts stimulate the economy. Unfortunately, he's fallen more than 2.2 million jobs short of the projection made by his own economists.
posted by Postroad
on Jul 28, 2004 -
6 comments
Canadian Tax Dollars at Work I am sure there are some hard
drinking working Metafilterites out there that could be Canada's official wine co-ordinator. You would have to give wine away to senior politicians and hard stuff like that.
posted by Coop
on Jul 20, 2004 -
9 comments
Say goodbye to more jobs? This is an interesting research report from the Gartner Group on the future of banking, money and economic transition. One of the participants at a conference that Gartner cites is Bernard Leitaer, who is
interviewed here. Leitaer is the author of the book
The Future of Money. He argues " the malaise Japan has suffered since the early 1990s reflects an economic challenge the whole developed world has begun to face. Today, European and U.S. factories, too, suffer from overcapacity. The vaunted productivity growth spurred by the digital revolution has raised the economy’s stall speed. If the natural growth rate of the U.S. economy has risen to 4% annually, anything less than that rate will cause firms to trim capacity. A firm’s revenue growth often must come at the expense of competitors as well as its own profits because companies have trouble raising prices. In response, companies cut costs any way they can, usually by laying off employees and squeezing suppliers, which causes further layoffs. For developed countries, the
safety valves that limited damage during contractions in manufacturing may not work. In past recessions, laid-off factory workers in the Great Lakes states, for example, could migrate to the growing Sun Belt to find new jobs. In the present transition, areas with job growth may lie overseas." The long heralded rise of the information economy, the death of distance and the rise of
the
global knowledge workers is paradigm shift that our
goverment leader's seem ill equiped to handle.
posted by thedailygrowl
on Mar 16, 2004 -
36 comments
Looking for a job? Well, one of the
hot temp agencies in the nation is
FPI, Inc. Recruting from an active base of
some 80,000 people across the nation, and
enjoying exemption from competitive bidding (
although reform is on the way), FPI produces garments and textile goods. In fact, it's
the largest supplier of clothing and textiles for the U.S. government. Net sales for fiscal year 2001 were $583.5 million and, despite an economic shortfall, they rose to $678.7 million in 2002. What accounts for such an unlikely success? Well, the secret can be found in FPI's labor base. FPI only employs prisoners, paying them between $.23 and $1.15 an hour. Of course,
with so many resumes to choose from,
factory expansion and
rising sales figures and profitability (PDF), who knows just how high PDI's lustre will soar?
posted by ed
on Nov 20, 2003 -
11 comments
McDonalds CEO Puts McJob in Mainstream. By taking Merriam-Webster to task for including
McJob ("low paying and dead-end work") in its latest Collegiate Dictionary, McDonald's CEO Jim Cantalupo has ensured that yet another disparaging fast-food web-fed meme joins the venerable "You want fries with that?" If this had been Fox, I would have said it was intentional.
posted by mischief
on Nov 8, 2003 -
39 comments
This Guy in Minnesota just got laid-off and he's spending his time following around Bush's economic team on their tour of the upper midwest as they share their "
upbeat outlook" on our nation's economy. He's following
their tourmobile with
his own tourmobile and has been chasing them around in parkinglots and at fast food places. He finally cornered the Treasury Secretary whose advice to the job-seeker was to "just wait." What's your economic reality? Is it closer to the sunny optimism of the big shiny tourbus, or the laid-off reality of the homemade minivan? (Check out the particularly funny bit about how he stumbled on the entire press corps only when he was looking for a dumpster.)
posted by amoeba
on Jul 30, 2003 -
84 comments
Verbal Attack: Dave Suthibut ignores the crappy job market and applies for positions like it's 1999. He uses his
blog to keep track of e-mail exchanges between himself and H/R personnel. (via
handcoding)
posted by Ufez Jones
on Jul 3, 2003 -
34 comments
She works, he doesn't Last week's Newsweek had a story about women who work and their husbands don't-either laid off or for other reasons.
Personally, I know of at least 10 couples where the woman has been the "alpha earner" as well as where the men have been out of work for long periods of time. They may not go out and golf the whole time and they surf the internet "looking for jobs", but the bottom line is they don't go out and get a job, any job, to pay the bills, and appear to be okay letting their wives (who aren't happy about it) earn the money.
Why is this happening? It wasn't "ok" just a few years ago. Is it a
passive-aggressive thing? A reaction to years of expecting to be the
sole bread winner? Why do all my women friends in this situation agree that if they were laid off, they would get ANY job immediately, but their men seem to think it's okay to coast for months to years. And why the
double standards? Why does being the sole earner make women angry and resentful, even though they may embrace the feminist agenda wholeheartedly?
posted by aacheson
on May 15, 2003 -
91 comments
Are Teachers Overpaid? Tamim Ansary poses and attempts to answer this question in a thoughtful column, full of interesting links to delve deeper into the issue. Bottom line, teachers
are overpaid...that is, if you want lower taxes, school funding will be cut and teacher salaries will go down. How does that bumper sticker go again, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" ?
posted by msacheson
on Feb 4, 2003 -
46 comments
"This is getting ridiculous!" complained one veteran programmer on USENET a bit over two years ago... after being out of the workforce for a while, he was having trouble getting back in the door. While there's no way to put yourself in his prospective employers shoes and make a real judgement, it looks like he had the chops. Wonder how he's doing today...
general conditions don't seem good, and I know several people with the same problem. The longer a period of unemployment goes, the worse your resume looks, and the harder it is to get a job. How do you break the cycle (from either a policy or a jobseeker standpoint)?
posted by namespan
on Jan 4, 2003 -
29 comments
The Nametag Nation gets a voice online.
Retail Workers along with our brethren in
food service are the bulk of the nations clock-punchers now, and we've got a lot on our minds. Some sites, like the above linked, offer info on serious concerns.
Other sites just let us vent. You may not agree with what we think, but we deserve to be heard from.
posted by jonmc
on Jul 16, 2002 -
29 comments
In you like f**ckedcompany... ...here's another job site with a naughty word in the title. "Job hunting daily is bad enough without having to deal with employers who want you to speak Swahili for little or no pay."
posted by sassone
on Jun 19, 2002 -
23 comments
Cadence engineer fired for activism: So, an engineer for
Cadence Design Systems, on his own time and dime went to Bethlehem to do humanitarian work with the
International Solidarity Movement, a group of pro-Palestinian activists who believe in non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. When he returned, he was immediately terminated due to "inappropriate politics in an area where Cadence does business (Israel)".
Should corporations have the right to mandate the political views of their employees, contractors and subsidiary workers? Would there be more outrage if he was fired for supporting the Israeli occupation? When a Christian's beliefs run contrary to Jewish interests, is it automatically fair to fire the Christian?
posted by dejah420
on May 29, 2002 -
57 comments
Can dropping out of school be a good career move? According to Fabula magazine some teenagers can thrive if they leave state education and endeavor to teach themselves at home. This is 'unschooling' and the writer seems to think it's becoming an increasingly popular way to go: "Unschoolers can read what they want, volunteer, do internships, or become an apprentice. The can also write a novel, tackle advanced math problems, go on hikes, or even audit classes in college (which are very different from high school classes). The point is to do whatever they’re excited about." Which sounds fine in theory, however how are they going to survive in the job market? I'm having enough issues and I've a degree and six years experience in a number of positions. Sooner or later surely things will come home to roost for them eventually. Won't they?
posted by feelinglistless
on May 23, 2002 -
41 comments
Confessions of a sex shop clerk - What makes me think this is the kind of job everyone else dreams of in secret? Anyways, as a sidenote, we'd definitely be better off making love instead of war right now, don't you think?
posted by betobeto
on Oct 21, 2001 -
7 comments
Over-educated, over here and overwhelmed The teacher shortage in Britain is so acute, that talent from the four corners is being shipped in at double the cost. The irony is, that if our teachers were actually paid the salary this gentleman is getting, there would be more of them...
posted by feelinglistless
on Sep 6, 2001 -
11 comments
I'm not really sure if I feel for these
people or not. A lean job market is no picnic, but c'mon, there are
other jobs out there. Maybe it is some sort of divine retribution for these shelter denizens after spending months cutting people off while yapping on the cell-phone behind the wheel of the leased
Porsche. Yes, that was a run-on sentence.
posted by donkeysuck
on Jun 15, 2001 -
20 comments
"Everyone who writes original content online needs to get a day job." John Scalzi argues that this is the most likely way that we're going to see quality online content survive as for-profit ventures like Suck continue to crash down around us. He points to cool stuff a lot of us are already familiar with (
Lileks and glenn macdonald's
The War Against Silence) and some sites I hadn't heard of until now (Rick McGinnis'
The Diary Thing). Scalzi practices what he preaches: he doesn't post every day -- hey, he's a professional writer and keeping his family fed comes first -- but what he does post is
choice. (Probable future URL for today's article is
here).
posted by maudlin
on Jun 14, 2001 -
20 comments
An
exchange between James Fallows and Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
[L]et me explain that your book is the account of three month-long episodes of attempting to live entirely on earnings from $7- or $8-per-hour jobs. You show up in low-wage cities and try to get on your feet, like someone "graduating" from welfare to work. One of many intriguing aspects is the juggling of three challenges: landing a job (not that hard, in the "tight" economy of the late nineties); doing the job (sometimes quite hard, as you make vivid); and finding a place to live (nearly impossible, for reasons we will get to).
The material questions are 1) Do we care? 2) What should we do about it? The author makes a couple of suggestion a couple of links into the article. What do you think?
link via
adam
posted by Sean Meade
on May 8, 2001 -
51 comments
51,631 dot com layoffs as of Feb. 01, 2001. Is it that the web allows us to simultaneously view the usual failure of 99% of new businesses, a sign of the coming recession, or just a result of bad business plans and get rich quick schemes? Or was it simply too good to last?
Whatever the reason, it's depressing.
posted by crushed
on Feb 2, 2001 -
19 comments
