"...everybody’s worst fears are coming true, as far as we can tell."

November 17, 2013 8:34 AM

Caught in Unemployment’s Revolving Door (SLNYT)

“I’ve been turned down from McDonald’s because I was told I was too articulate,” she says. “I got denied a job scrubbing toilets because I didn’t speak Spanish and turned away from a laundromat because I was ‘too pretty.’ I’ve also been told point-blank to my face, ‘We don’t hire the unemployed.’ And the two times I got real interest from a prospective employer, the credit check ended it immediately.”

For Ms. Barrington-Ward, joblessness itself has become a trap, an impediment to finding a job. Economists see it the same way, concerned that joblessness lasting more than six months is a major factor preventing people from getting rehired, with potentially grave consequences for tens of millions of Americans.
...

Facing those kinds of odds, some of the long-term jobless have simply given up and dropped out of the labor force. So while official figures show that the number of long-term jobless has fallen steeply from its recessionary high of 6.7 million, many researchers fear that this number could mean as much bad news as good. Workers over 50 may be biding their time until they can start receiving Social Security. Younger workers may be going to school to avoid a tough job market. Others may be going on disability, helping to explain that program’s surging rolls.

Stan Hampton, 59, a veteran of the Iraq war, is now earning his associate degree. But he has not had a job since returning from active duty in 2007, and is now living in an apartment complex for veterans near Las Vegas.

“I’m just trying to hang on until my retirement kicks in,” he said, though he stressed that he would still look for a job. “I have not been in jail or prison, nor am I an alcoholic, drug addict or gambling addict. I am simply old, unemployed and out of money.”

...

In a recent study, Rand Ghayad a Ph.D. candidate at Northeastern University, sent out 4,800 dummy résumés to job postings. Those résumés that were supposedly from recently unemployed applicants with no relevant experience were more likely to elicit a call for an interview than those supposedly from experienced workers out of a job for more than six months. Indeed, the callback rate for the long-term jobless ranged from just 1 to 3 percent, versus 9 to 16 percent for newly unemployed workers.

Unemployment becomes a “sorting criterion,” in the words of a separate study with similar findings. It found that being out of a job for more than nine months decreased interview requests by 20 percent among people applying to low- or medium-skilled jobs.

posted by tonycpsu (184 comments total)

I've been helping a friend hunt for a job in his field -- a not particularly specialized, rare, or esoteric one, yet one where his experience is unambiguously an asset -- and it's ridiculous how difficult it's been trying to get as far as making introductions... even to prospective employers with job postings he's qualified for.

He's been unemployed for two years because his employer laid him off while collapsing and family matters tied him down in one of the majorly depressed parts of the country. Now he's freed up and he'll move anywhere... but being unemployed for two years in a majorly depressed part of the country is apparently sufficient grounds to screen him away.

With a job market tipped this badly in favor of the employers, there's no reason to talk to anybody with the scent of failure on them. Even if there's no failure, only circumstances.
posted by at by at 8:48 AM on November 17, 2013 [6 favorites]

But new evidence shows that bias plays a much larger role than previously thought. Some of the long-term unemployed might never find work because businesses simply refuse to hire them.

Considering how often bias turns out to have "a much larger role than previously thought," you think we'd wise up and start using it as a go-to answer....
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:49 AM on November 17, 2013 [24 favorites]

It's almost like creating a permanent desperate underclass was the point.
posted by The Whelk at 8:51 AM on November 17, 2013 [92 favorites]

The point of who exactly? The cabal of just-above-minimum-wage McDonald's restaurant managers who secretly run the American economy?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:54 AM on November 17, 2013 [17 favorites]

And even short-term unemployment, if you weren't coming out of a job where you just spent at last two years, is also toxic. I got laid off at one point because the very small business I worked for got sold and the buyer promptly decided to close it down and keep only one of the staff. I had only been there a couple months. I'd had no trouble finding that job and had been paid quite well and treated quite well. I only got one response ever from the couple hundred resumes I sent out after that, and the job that followed was terrible and grossly underpaid to the point that I don't think anybody else would have accepted it. The reason didn't matter; it was explained in my cover letter and everybody who read it thought it was fine.

It's almost like creating a permanent desperate underclass was the point.

So, yeah. That. It's not the restaurant managers who are the problem, it's the people who manage the people who do hiring at the well-paid positions, and everything trickles down to the point where McDonald's is so swimming in applicants that they can be super picky.
posted by Sequence at 8:56 AM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

That's the funny thing about capitalism: there's nobody in charge. There is no Capitalism Central Committee which writes memos to underlings on how to better oppress workers.

It just ... does it automatically. It's like a ....a machine, a machine that just does what it does.
posted by Avenger at 8:57 AM on November 17, 2013 [26 favorites]

Yeah I don't think it's an organized sinister plot. I think we're just mostly monkeys, and so our monkey-brains blame people for things that quite clearly are not their fault. Like their former employers going out of business, for instance. The barely-evolved parts of our brains understand that this (in most cases) couldn't possibly be the applicant's fault. But the monkey brain is just flinging poo at anything that looks even slightly less-than-perfect.
posted by 1adam12 at 8:57 AM on November 17, 2013 [4 favorites]

The point of who exactly?

Lots and lots of ill-considered short-term decision by people who have all bought into a paradigm of "cost-cutting" and "tax-cutting" as a panacea for growth, when all the evidence shows that it just funnels the money upwards. I think this is part of what is meant by "capitalism generates its own crisis" -- ie, rather than a secret cabal, the system itself generates booms and busts that don't matter to the system (so are never "corrected"), but matter a lot to the people who get ground up by the process. It's not like this is a regrettable side effect of uncontrollable historical processes; these are real people being destroyed by an interlocking series of policies at national, business, and personal scales.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:02 AM on November 17, 2013 [45 favorites]

It's absolutely a plot, conducted openly. The name for it is neoliberalism, and it has been the policy of every American President since Reagan. The point of the dominant model of capitalist economics for the last thirty years has been to funnel wealth upward and break the working class. Nothing about this is accidental. It's all been very open.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:03 AM on November 17, 2013 [98 favorites]

Self.employment.

It isn't perfect, but enterprise needs no permission. When presented with the alternative of no work at all, there seems to be very little to lose.

Of course, I don't think the entire economy could be self employed... as a friend used to say "We can't all just iron each other's pants". Teachers, researchers, functionaries of many sorts would probably have a hard time making a business from their key specialties, but at least one of our underdeveloped specialties might ought to be survival. Not everyone gets a gold watch at Ford. These days, almost no one gets a gold watch at their job after 30 years, and when they do, along comes a Scott Walker and picks their pockets. Security is a chimera. At the end of the day, we are responsible for feeding ourselves.

Just thinking out loud....
posted by FauxScot at 9:06 AM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

I know better than to read the comments on NYTimes articles, but couldn't miss the first one. The commenter says he doesn't understand why people won't take less than glamorous jobs.

And then in practically the same breath states that his company is on the outskirts of town. Well, if you don't drive, or your car isn't "dependable," then this job is out of reach.

Myself, I'm a member of the chronically underemployed, and temp work is pretty much considered unemployed. Temping isn't viewed as a "way to get more experience in a broad range of fields." It's looked upon as a desperate grasp for scraps, or it's regarded as laziness. A swath of administrative assistant positions indicates, as an interviewer said to me last week that I "must really love being a secretary" and so she couldn't understand why I was asking about growth within the company, and why their previous secretary left the company (there is no room for growing within the company, and she got tired of working for them....) They had ten more candidates to interview.
posted by bilabial at 9:07 AM on November 17, 2013 [7 favorites]

I wouldn't call it open, Pope Guilty. It's not like Obama's making speeches about how he will crush the working class in America.
posted by indubitable at 9:07 AM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

I have no (implementable) solution to the larger structural problem, but, to the individual, my advice is to lie like a cheap rug -
2010-current Vandalay Industries, (in your cover letter - please don't call, I don't want them to know I'm looking for another job).
Or second, maybe groups of long term unemployed people could start LLC "businesses" where they could all work and put on their resumes.
posted by 445supermag at 9:10 AM on November 17, 2013 [15 favorites]

> It's almost like creating a permanent desperate underclass was the point.

I recently witnessed an employer declare they were moving their IT/software development departments from a major U.S. metropolitan area to somewhere in the boonies. Anybody who wanted to transfer would get a modest relocation stipend, anybody who didn't would get preferential treatment for department transfers, and stock equity buybacks if they chose to leave the company.

Of course, there was nowhere for these employees to transfer within the company, except to the new office in the boonies. Where there was no guarantee of employment for their spouses, and the schools for their kids weren't necessarily as good, and it took many of them far from their families. So most of them chose the buybacks and left.

And the company instantly began saving millions of dollars a year on payroll by hiring new people in the boonies at salaries that wouldn't be considered living wages in the big city, at significant discounts compared to the salaries of the 10-15 year veterans they'd just cut off.

Of course, the company lost a corresponding decade or two of domain knowledge about how things worked, and ops are probably a shambles now, but that's not what quarterly financial reports measure.

> That's the funny thing about capitalism: there's nobody in charge. There is no Capitalism Central Committee which writes memos to underlings on how to better oppress workers.

If common processes lead to desirable-looking outcomes, a lot of entities will do things because they see others do it. It doesn't require coordination.
posted by at by at 9:14 AM on November 17, 2013 [32 favorites]

The name for it is neoliberalism, and it has been the policy of every American President since Reagan. The point of the dominant model of capitalist economics for the last thirty years has been to funnel wealth upward and break the working class. Nothing about this is accidental. It's all been very open.

This is just not a realistic depiction of the last 30 years of economic policy and results, at all. American unemployment rates have been for the most part substantially better than those in other developed countries, see here for harmonized unemployment rates compared to other large developed economies. What we have in America is a severe recession which has been aggravated by very poor macroeconomic policy in the past four years, including an overly tight monetary stance and excessively rapid deficit reduction.
posted by dsfan at 9:15 AM on November 17, 2013 [23 favorites]

Ugh. Is there any part of our society that's not built on blaming the victim?
posted by medusa at 9:19 AM on November 17, 2013 [35 favorites]

None of the statistics or findings in this article were new to me, but it still really hit home to hear these stories. I've got a job that I like, and one that's about as stable as it gets in this economy, but my wife was laid off four years ago, and began having serious health problems soon thereafter (these problems began long before she was laid off, but worsened significantly in the following year.) She's not yet at the point health-wise where she could re-enter the work force, but even if she could, her prospects would be very grim. She's got a M.A. and several years of relevant experience in her field, but four years is a long time to be out of work, and employers don't want to hear excuses about multiple spine surgeries, a life-threatening spinal staph infection, etc.

Financially, we're basically treading water -- we live comfortably, but the medical bills and the lack of a second income mean our savings stays flat most months, to the point that I decided last month to decrease my 403(b) contribution to keep our monthly cash flow about even. We've postponed a lot of work that we need to do on our house, and have scaled back or canceled vacations we thought we'd be able to do as a couple of recently married 30-somethings with no kids.

These all fall under the "first world problems" category in a nation with so many people who wonder where their next meal will come from, but at the same time, they're reminders of how fucked so many other people are who didn't have the advantages we had growing up. As long as I can find work in my lucrative field of software development, and as long as my wife's health remains stable or improves, I doubt we'll be forced to choose which utilities we pay each month. Still, neither of these is guaranteed, and I worry for the many others who deal with the same challenges but aren't as fortunate as we have been.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:20 AM on November 17, 2013 [12 favorites]

The effects of austerity were never some arcane secret that, if only Paul Krugman shouted louder, policymakers would reverse. More informed elites will not act against their interests. That isn't to say folks like Tim Geithner aren't True Believers, but they're so insulated from the carnage (because of their policies!), it makes no difference whether they're Randian disciples or cynical bastards.
posted by gorbweaver at 9:20 AM on November 17, 2013 [8 favorites]

Speaking of Timmeh...

Geithner to Join Private Equity Firm
posted by tonycpsu at 9:21 AM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

It isn't perfect, but enterprise needs no permission. When presented with the alternative of no work at all, there seems to be very little to lose.

That's part of the problem. Nothing to lose means nothing to risk, and you can't gamble with no money. It takes capitol to start up most any new business, as well as some time spend working very hard, but not making any money. And it isn't like banks are exactly eager to give out small business loans at all right now, let alone to the chronically unemployed.
posted by Garm at 9:24 AM on November 17, 2013 [14 favorites]

What we have in America is a severe recession which has been aggravated by very poor macroeconomic policy in the past four years, including an overly tight monetary stance and excessively rapid deficit reduction.

Well, we also have essentially stagnant wages for the past 40 years for the working masses, while the investor class has only seen their fortunes rise and rise. Even now, during this so-called recovery, jobs aren't being created but the stock market continues to reach record highs.

And really, this recession that started a few years ago was largely created by the desires of the stagnant-wage classes trying to look as if they were achieving the success of past generations by taking equity out of their houses to invest in home improvements or vehicle purchases or whatever... attempting to simulate prosperity by mortgaging what real belongings they had.

This was made ever-so-easy because the investing class had invented these vehicles which supposedly removed risk from the mortgage market through slice-and-dice investment vehicles, and so those writing the loans were willing to basically throw money at anyone who walked through the door. This led to all kinds of (what amounts to) loan fraud on behalf of both the loan makers and the loan receivers.

If wages had actually kept increasing as they should have over the past 40 years, if companies and stock holders had actually allowed those doing the work to be paid for their work, sharing the wealth generated across a broader base of people, this need for loans in order to simulate prosperity never would have arisen. Because people would have actually been prosperous, with actual money to spend, not borrowed funds. And the economy would have been more healthy because we wouldn't be concentrating basically 50% of the wealth generated by the workers of the country into the bank accounts of 1% of the population.

This isn't a problem that rises out of the recession. The recession is the result of the failure of capitalism to properly reward the workers for the work they do.
posted by hippybear at 9:27 AM on November 17, 2013 [120 favorites]

These all fall under the "first world problems" category in a nation with so many people who wonder where their next meal comes from, but at the same time, they're reminders of how fucked so many other people are who didn't have the advantages we had growing up.

I don't know. When a person can fall from fairly comfortable to destitute in a few years just because of a few pieces of bad luck, when illness might completely destroy a middle-class family, when an upper class can rig the economy to privatize all profit and nationalize all loss, well, that doesn't seem too "First World" to me.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:28 AM on November 17, 2013 [66 favorites]

This isn't a problem that rises out of the recession. The recession is the result of the failure of capitalism to properly reward the workers for the work they do.

Welcome to the one world plantation.
posted by Pudhoho at 9:30 AM on November 17, 2013 [7 favorites]

American unemployment rates have been for the most part substantially better than those in other developed countries, see here for harmonized unemployment rates compared to other large developed economies. What we have in America is a severe recession which has been aggravated by very poor macroeconomic policy in the past four years, including an overly tight monetary stance and excessively rapid deficit reduction.

Why are you acting as though the First World being hit less hard than poorer nations somehow discredits the idea that there's a long-term effort to break the working class? Yes, it's better for us than it's been for them. Why on earth are you pretending that's some kind of great insight?
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:34 AM on November 17, 2013 [14 favorites]

Revolving door? More like a barricaded door.
posted by manoffewwords at 9:35 AM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

"Ugh. Is there any part of our society that's not built on blaming the victim?" And in the same vein--it is all to easy ( and understandably so ) for many to see themselves as the victim. While this is understandable and has an element of objective reality it a self definition that further disempowers. Waiting for someone/somebody/something to change so you can move on is not a good way to get moving. It can be a long wait. I was born at the right time, with the right parents and a multitude of opportunities during my 20's and 30's. Critical periods for developing a career. I took some risks, put in a bit of extra effort but 80% (?) luck and timing. As will say again and again--it is one of the main purposes of government to continually reinvest in the working, middle,professional and entrepreneurial classes.
posted by rmhsinc at 9:36 AM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

Pope Guilty: " Why are you acting as though the First World being hit less hard than poorer nations somehow discredits the idea that there's a long-term effort to break the working class? Yes, it's better for us than it's been for them. Why on earth are you pretending that's some kind of great insight?"

I wasn't aware that Canada, the UK, France, Japan, and Italy had been kicked out of the "first world".
posted by tonycpsu at 9:38 AM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

So I was reading a book, called the Loyalty Effect. The main thesis is that the primary business of a business is creating value, not profit (so profit is only a sign of value, and not the thing people should strive for) and being loyal to your customers, employees and shareholders (in that order) is the best path towards doing that. Written in the 90's. Talks up Chick-Fil-A, not because it's conservative Christian or anything, but because it's a place where franchise managers can legitimately be prosperous and share in the wealth made by the business, so employees generally are loyal to it and customers become loyal and get a lot of value.

Funny thing is that this guy's a Bain consultant. Talks up his managing director at the time, who was Mitt Romney. Talks up private equity, because it allows you to be less insanely focused on short-term profit.

And then, literally in the next page, the guy talks about how high-frequency trading (since this is the 90's and he's not a computer guy, he's talking about pension funds getting 5% belowmarket results by trading every four hours) is fundamentally like pollution and should honestly be regulated by the government, because it benefits managers at the expense of investors.

I really was wondering, "why can't we have onerous neoliberal kids like that nowadays?"
posted by curuinor at 9:39 AM on November 17, 2013 [15 favorites]

Why are you acting as though the First World being hit less hard than poorer nations somehow discredits the idea that there's a long-term effort to break the working class? Yes, it's better for us than it's been for them. Why on earth are you pretending that's some kind of great insight?

What the heck are you talking about? The poorer people of the world have done very well over the last few decades.
posted by dsfan at 9:41 AM on November 17, 2013 [7 favorites]

This reminds me of other demand >> supply situations. For example, I'd bet that probably 99%+ of those who apply to Harvard would thrive there but with an acceptance rate of 5%, the admissions people have to figure out how to filter 19 out of every 20 applications. The way you do that is to filter on ANYTHING. 3.99 GPA? Not good enough. 2nd in class? Not good enough. Application folded weirdly? Deny. Staple too far towards the corner? Deny. Didn't use the Oxford comma in the essay? Deny. Already accepted somebody from Idaho? Deny. Volunteered for a domestic instead of international charity? Deny. Played the wrong sport? Deny.

So you're a hiring manager and you've got a stack of a zillion applications and how are you going to cut it down to manageable size? You do the same thing: filter on everything. Currently unemployed? Toss. Marginal credit rating? Toss. Seems a bit old? Toss. Overweight? Toss. Ethnic? Toss. Young children? Toss. Gay? Toss. Do enough of that and your stack of 1000 applications is now down to half a dozen and you can start making decisions, right?

I'm not trying to defend this. In fact, I think it's epic BS. If it was me, and I thought my unemployment was preventing me from getting work, I'd absolutely lie about it.

Bigger picture, long term and large scale unemployment is a huge, huge problem that needs fixing at a societal level. However, it probably won't get fixed until bad things start happening to governments, large corporations, and the wealthy.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 9:41 AM on November 17, 2013 [12 favorites]

curuinor: " I really was wondering, "why can't we have onerous neoliberal kids like that nowadays?""

Hell, I'd take 80s-era capitalist corporate raiders over today's neoliberals. I think even Gordon Gekko would call bullshit on the idea of focusing on deficit reduction when you can borrow money for free and spend it mobilizing idle workers to create value.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:41 AM on November 17, 2013 [4 favorites]

In my field, many employers will ignore periods of self-employment, even though I'm receiving checks and taking cases with real, demonstrable clients. To many of them, self-employment = unemployment. Big institutions are heavily biased in favor of other big institutions.
posted by 1adam12 at 9:42 AM on November 17, 2013 [9 favorites]

If the private sector cannot or will not put put people to work, while at the same time sitting on trillions in unspent cash and unused capacity, the only answer is for the government to step in and hire those unemployed directly.

The fact that we have let so many willing and able people rot in an economy overflowing with abundance is a great moral failing of out time.
posted by willie11 at 9:43 AM on November 17, 2013 [14 favorites]

Self.employment. It isn't perfect, but enterprise needs no permission. When presented with the alternative of no work at all, there seems to be very little to lose.

Wow, only took a few commenters to get to the first "here is my brilliant solution for a huge systemic problem" comment. Wish I were surprised.

On top of the pure loss of jobs, there's this image of the "good" job hunter that's insidious and toxic. You can see where Ms. Barrington-Ward's friend has internalized that here:

“She’s brilliant,” said Allyson Hartzell, a longtime friend with whom Ms. Barrington-Ward is currently staying. “She gets up in the morning. She has her tasks. She’s always working on her personal projects, trying to generate money. She goes to job interviews. She keeps herself in shape.

See, our article subject is one of the good unemployed! She's still holding out hope for something better, she's used the time to fulfill her own personal goals. Even managed to stay in shape, because everyone knows that the bad unemployed people eat chips and laze on the couch all day.

The undercurrents of that mindset are pretty horrifying. The depression that can set in when you have no work? Just didn't look hard enough. Mad at the neoliberal philosophy that got us to this point? You can't blame structural products for your own unhappiness! What structural problems? Anger just cuts into your ability to look harder! And, no offense FauxScot, but suggestions like "just try self-employment" feed into this mindset too. There shouldn't be this presumed gap of moral failure between people who have the resources and skills to be entrepreneurs and people who do not.

I'm in the middle of a part-time temp job with no benefits and no upward mobility in sight. It took me months to get this far, and I'm finally starting to look for something better. Maybe I'm not one of the good job hunters, because sometimes I take off my perky "I can surely find something if I stay positive and hold out hope" face. Fuck that noise. Everybody has the right to be angry about where this system's ended up.
posted by ActionPopulated at 9:43 AM on November 17, 2013 [54 favorites]

Self.employment. It isn't perfect, but enterprise needs no permission. When presented with the alternative of no work at all, there seems to be very little to lose.

I started a business making bootstraps and now I'm part of the 1%.
posted by entropicamericana at 9:46 AM on November 17, 2013 [22 favorites]

It's not like Obama's making speeches about how he will crush the working class in America.

He promised, while campaigning in '07, to stand with public workers if their collective bargaining rights were threatened. He then refused to during the highest profile challenge to these rights in a generation.

Obama doesn't need to say it - actions like this tacitly help to crush working Americans every day.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:48 AM on November 17, 2013 [18 favorites]

Self.employment. It isn't perfect, but enterprise needs no permission. When presented with the alternative of no work at all, there seems to be very little to lose.


Exactly! You can always start selling apples on street corners.
posted by Pudhoho at 9:48 AM on November 17, 2013 [5 favorites]

There are also vanishingly few industries where self-employment is viable if you don't have significant assets to start with. I would need about $500 worth of business licenses and such, $2k worth of software, plus a marketing budget, even if I was going to be working out of my house and had a computer already. (In my field, working out of my house would severely reduce the number of clients I could get.) That's also presuming I'm really competent enough to do it with zero management and supervision, which many perfectly good employees are not, especially if they weren't previously the managers/supervisors.

And that marketing budget matters. The thing about the current economy is that if all the existing widget makers are struggling enough to be laying people off, there is probably not sufficient demand for widgets for people without economies of scale to produce them at a profit to start with--but you won't even get a crack at it if everybody's already going to Acme because they don't know you from Adam.
posted by Sequence at 9:52 AM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

This is what I saw when I was working as a librarian in a poorer neighborhood: the majority of people who are unemployed have a lot of hustle. People do try to find ways to start a business and make some money.

But unless they happen to be tech-savvy and street-smart, it's really easy for them to get tangled up in scams. Self-employment is good BUT not this opportunity you heard about, it's a pyramid scheme. Education is good BUT not the place that advertises on the subway, they don't have good job placement statistics. And no sure things anywhere, nothing that doesn't demand that you put money you can hardly afford into something that may not pan out. So many people start out with hope and hustle and end up struggling to sell MLM stuff to their friends and family.
posted by Jeanne at 9:57 AM on November 17, 2013 [21 favorites]

jcreigh: " Okay, I get that austerity isn't helping, but how has monetary policy been tight? The fed funds rate has been holding at or near 0% for those four years, plus quantitative easing to the tune of $1.4 trillion in mortgage backed securities. What else can they do?"

The sizes of the quantitative easing programs were calculated primarily to not upset the Masters of the Universe, rather than to actually match the size of the shortfall in aggregate demand. Many economists said this at the time. Austerity is far more of a problem than QE alone could solve, but if all the Congress is letting you do is QE, then you can't half-ass it.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:01 AM on November 17, 2013

People would love it if I were still an HR manager - I never looked at the lag between jobs, "the box", or credit ratings (I even convinced company owner that to do so was unAmerican BS.)

It's now nearly ten years since I was poisoned and became disabled... I've got about a dozen well meaning friends (usually the lucky ones) asking about if I plan to return to work anytime soon. In this this economy, with a decade since my last employment? Not even if I were magically well all the sudden.
posted by _paegan_ at 10:08 AM on November 17, 2013 [4 favorites]

In technical fields, long term unemployment suggests that candidates may not be up to date with skills. It isn't necessarily true - skills don't change as fast as we pretend they do, unemployment actually allows time to develop new skills or read up on literature - but you can understand why it becomes a filter.

And a lot of the folks using it as a filter are not part of a class or a conspiracy. They're people who would rather be getting work done than filtering through a never ending pile of resumes, half of which are inappropriate for the job listing in the first place. (With increasing unemployment this seems to get worse - more people applying to any remotely relevant listing s well as people trying to make their quota of job applications for Unemployment)

I don't deny that there are policy and class issues that amplify the problem. But certainly not everyone in a hiring position is looking to keep the poor poor. Often they just want to find a competent, friendly coworker/employee and to get back to work.
posted by maryr at 10:08 AM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

I have done some HR work, and it is astonishing how obvious it is that some people are just applying for any job they can find, without having the necessary skills or even explaining why, in a cover letter, they might be a good fit for the job. There are lots of people who don't even read job postings before e-mailing their resume. I'm not victim blaming or saying this is even ordinarily the case, but part of the reason HR managers have hundreds of resumes to read through is because of this, partly.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:16 AM on November 17, 2013 [4 favorites]

It occured to me while reading this thread that there must be a market for fake employment histories complete with references, and sure enough there is: http://thereferencestore.com/
posted by Jacqueline at 10:21 AM on November 17, 2013 [10 favorites]

Those breaks in employment are a killer for applications unfortunately. Part of it is the perceived drop in skills but part of it is the bias for people who are already employed.
I could give a damn about your credit score and it should be dropped as a filter. As an employer, all I care about is if you do your job well and turn up on time.
posted by arcticseal at 10:24 AM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

Self.employment. It isn't perfect, but enterprise needs no permission. When presented with the alternative of no work at all, there seems to be very little to lose.

I'm self employed and my first couple of years (starting in 2007 on the eve of the shitstorm) were brutal, even though I had savings and some minor extra cash from selling off most of my possessions. I had absolutely no social life, no family or dependents, and an empty 300sqft studio apartment I could barely afford. It was terrible, I was probably depressed, and I never left my place because I was afraid I would be tempted to do something extreme like spend $2 on the bus, or god forbid, buy myself lunch. That was a very lonely time in my life, but I am stubborn as fuck and I stuck it out.

So now I'm doing great in spite of the economy, so I'm like a capitalist fairy tale of bootstrappy self determination, right? Bullshit, I worked hard but I was extremely privileged - being young, having savings, a college education mostly free of debt, having no dependents or health issues (I just now, thanks to the ACA, can afford health insurance for the first time in my adult life), and most of all knowing that if I really did fuck up severely my family was supportive and had the means to be my safety net. I was not going to be out on the streets if everything fell apart or I had to start looking for a "real job". I was also in a creative field where the institutional type requirements you would put on a resume were unimportant (I've never had a real resume), and most people were freelancers so there was an existing network of support I could tap into.

So you're right, I didn't have to have ask permission, I just had to have every single break in the world handed to me on a platter and go into a field that had few bullshit institutional barriers like this article is talking about.

If Americans actually gave shit about the mythical 'job creator', we would implement something like Italy's Marcora Law that allows unemployed workers to band together and receive their unemployment benefits as a lump sum as capital to start a new business.
posted by bradbane at 10:34 AM on November 17, 2013 [40 favorites]

grossly underpaid to the point that I don't think anybody else would have accepted it.

Somebody upthread scoffed at the idea that there could be a "...whole point" to all this.

That's the whole point, right there.

Prior to 2008, we didn't have a whole class of people who felt lucky just to have a job, who'd take anything no matter how insulting the pay or conditions.

I've mostly been OK over the course of the recession. Wall to wall gainful employment up until last year, when I moved cross-country and had a hard time getting a job in my field. Now even that hiccup is on the way to being well behind me.

But:

- I haven't worked a job that has offered health insurance since 2010 (when I left the job I'd had since 2006).

- Pay rates have not gone up in my field since about 2006-2007.

- I'm currently paid as a PA, despite my position very much not being entry level in any way. Despite having seven years of experience in my field, and having not worked as a PA for about five years, now. I literally make exactly the same amount of money as I made in my very first job as a PA on a TV series, right out of college. Again, despite going on a decade of experience. And I'm grateful to have this job, after a year of underemployment and freelancing!

So now the people holding the reins of capital in the US have a labor force who've had our expectations drastically lowered over the last 6 years. And what's even better for them, WE'RE GRATEFUL FOR IT. We'll happily slave away at insulting pay rates and in with no benefits, because, hey, it's better than nothing.

And this goes all the way up the ladder to people with college degrees and white collar jobs. I can't even imagine what it must feel like to work in fast food under these conditions.
posted by Sara C. at 10:48 AM on November 17, 2013 [31 favorites]

We'll happily slave away at insulting pay rates and in with no benefits, because, hey, it's better than nothing.

Literally, considering the insidious rise of using unpaid interns as employees.
posted by Room 641-A at 10:58 AM on November 17, 2013 [8 favorites]

Oh, and when I say there were little institutional barriers I don't mean that I was sheltered from the larger, sexist/racist/etc. forces that permeate the corporate world of capitalism. Quite the opposite, because I fully realize that a large part of my success comes from getting entry level work that is often physically demanding, and typically given to young, white male dudes like me who think nothing of pulling 10-14 hour days moving heavy shit around as a way to 'pay your dues' and move up to the higher level jobs. Even in the progressive, artistic west coast bubble I work in sexism is a major and extremely obvious problem.

Sorry but the narratives surrounding self employment are just so ridiculous to me.
posted by bradbane at 10:59 AM on November 17, 2013

the insidious rise of using unpaid interns as employees.

That could have been another bullet point in my list.

I was an unpaid intern in 2005, before the recession.

I got to do real meaningful work that gave me connections as well as a specific and immediate bridge to paid work in what eventually became my career.

I worked three days a week, from 10 to 6.

This arrangement lasted for about two months, AND I received a bonus that retroactively paid me at least something.

Oh, and this internship? I basically fell into it. It didn't take months of applications and recommendation letters and fingers crossed hope I get it. I didn't feel privileged to have gotten the gig.

My understanding is that the above would be some kind of fairy tale to people applying for internships nowadays.
posted by Sara C. at 11:08 AM on November 17, 2013 [4 favorites]

Much like how all businesses, if left alone, become monopolies, all labor policy, if left alone, becomes unpaid.
posted by The Whelk at 11:09 AM on November 17, 2013 [10 favorites]

I wonder if part of the problem isn't states that refuse to pay unemployment if you are offered a job. So, say you apply for a job that looks promising, and they make you an offer that pays $9/hr. You can't afford to live on that, but if you don't take the job, you have no income at all. Having a low wage, high maintenance job takes your job searching ability away, etc.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:17 AM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

I am a biology professor at one of those Directional State Colleges currently being disparaged in another thread. I am currently on a search committee to hire new biology professors. The number of applications and the qualifications of the applicants is staggering, as is the fact that these people with PhDs in biological fields from well-regarded schools are either working dead-end soft money research jobs (and the sequester is killing those jobs off rapidly as it strangles the NIH and NSF) or are adjunct teaching (or both). Sometimes I get annoyed by the minimal effort put into the cover letters, or the lack of apparent interest in our particular school and its particular mission. But at the same time, I recognize just how freaking lucky I am to be a state employee in a permanent position with benefits, and I can't really begrudge the desperation that makes people send out their CV and generic cover letter to every single biology job advertised.
posted by hydropsyche at 11:18 AM on November 17, 2013 [5 favorites]

My sister got laid off in the UK in September from her PA job with an IT company that was about to lose a Government contract. She got a package, so it's not as bad as it could have been. She is now temping again until she can find a FT position, she's commuting long hours to the temp job she has for a couple of months, whilst also applying to anything that sounds like a good lead.

She's a hard worker and diligent, so I think she'll be OK eventually, but to be 43 and hunting in a saturated job seekers market in a role that is falling in demand must be terrifying. Her ex-husband drained her emergency fund, she has bills to pay and another 25 years plus to retirement on whatever pittance the Tories leave her with to live on. What world did we allow the 1% to create?
posted by arcticseal at 11:28 AM on November 17, 2013

Mod note: One comment deleted. As always, there is no telling people "fuck you" here. Please check your MefiMail. Thanks.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:39 AM on November 17, 2013

Wow. I hit a nerve. Imagine that on metafilter!

In retrospect, OP, don't even think about this as an approach. Self-employment is best entered from an employed state, not from desperation. There are enough risks and hurdles to overcome when you have the safety net of an employer already in place, and lots to learn. It's also best when you have funds to risk without dealing with the rent, etc.

There is certainly someone out there who will hire you, despite the structural defects in the economy. Somewhere in that haystack sits the needle you seek. The proof of course, is that after a while, most folks find work. A lot depends on who you encounter in your search, on how you manage your contacts, on how effectively you sell yourself to the few opportunities that arise. Persistence does pay off, but it is stressful to encounter a world where your only solution to not getting any positive responses is to keep doing the same thing.

A lot of vaporous arm waving about how those structural factors work against you is probably accurate, and just as probably useless drivel from the uninformed. Explaining hunger sucks when you have it. Is there any way you can change those factors other than soap boxing on them as some commentators are? I don't think so. Of course, I could be wrong. If you or anyone else here has a solution to the long term, structural changes in an economy that is not just 325 million Americans but the global conglomeration of nearly 7 billion interconnected souls, I'm sure I'll read about it when the Nobel committee awards the prizes. Good chance it is a topic of interest and relevance.

It apparently need restating that a clear understanding of economics is good personally, but perhaps not professionally. You know why. You are going to encounter employed managers. Who are hiring. From a very, very large pool. Infrequently. In a world where the rules have changed and where there are some structural changes afoot in the economy, from what I hear. At least here on metafilter.

There really isn't any alternative except sending out more inquiries. Sorry I suggested otherwise. As I said, it's not for everyone. A lot depends on what you are selling, and that's the case in self-employment as well as conventional gigs.

Good luck to you.
posted by FauxScot at 11:49 AM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

Self.employment.

It isn't perfect, but enterprise needs no permission. When presented with the alternative of no work at all, there seems to be very little to lose.

A man should pull himself up by his own bootstraps. Fortune favors the bold. There are no limits to what a man can achieve with some initiative and hard work and sticktoitiveness.

Your disparaging remarks offend me deeply. You are blaming the poor for being lazy. I expect to hear that from Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, not on MeFi. Last week I worked 48 hours, I was signed up for another 16 hours of overtime, a 64 hour work week, but suddenly overtime was cancelled. I work at a temp job with people with college degrees, MAs and PhDs, mathematicians, biologists, chemists, engineers, who are desperate to take jobs for $9.25 an hour. Most of us are long-term "marginally employed" and survive on temp work, food stamps, medicare, and local charities like food banks.

When I was first affected by the recession in nineteen ninety fucking two, I was appalled to when I read an article about mass layoffs in middle class workers like me. There were only two choices: find a job exactly like the one you lost, at exactly the same wage. Those jobs did not exist. Or else go work for minimum wage at Walmart. You could not take a real job at a lower wage, because employers figured you were overqualified and would go find a better job the moment the economy improved. So you were stuck working for minimum wage. That condition persists unto this very day. I have applied for jobs at my own company, jobs they try to promote from within. I am the worker they are looking for. I have decades of experience. I am absolutely overqualified for this job. In a decent economy, I would be able to easily find work in similar positions for $50k to $100k. The jobs I applied for are entry-level, offered at about $24. I would take them in a moment, because that would almost double my annual income. It would be a fucking bonanza. And I would be so grateful for this pathetically small income, I'd try to work my way up within the company by working my ass off for promotions. But no, I did not even get called for an interview.

A man of my age, with a 35+ year career, is presumed by many people to have accumulated a nest egg of investments sufficient to support his transition to self-employment as an entrepreneur, creating new jobs for himself and others. Those people are living on some other fucking planet than I am. Everyone I know has lost their life savings trying to stay afloat during prolonged unemployment. I look at some of my peers, astonished at their achievements through their careers, what they have learned, their skills, and what they still could achieve. And I see their vast potential wasted on make-work jobs, as they desperately work themselves to death, just to avoid becoming homeless. The potential of a whole generation is being squandered.

I sometimes think about a statement made by Leo Apotheker when he became CEO of Hewlett-Packard. For decades, HP was considered one of the great corporations in the world and a great place to work, because they valued their workers and their intellect, and what they could achieve. But when Apotheker took the helm, he was overwhelmed at the complexity of the massive workforce he was to lead. He said, "I wish I knew what HP knows." He absolutely had no idea of the knowledge of his workers, their experience, and what they were capable of achieving. And he promptly ran HP into the ground, only being fired when HP was at the brink of bankruptcy, threatening the jobs of the corporate Vice Presidents and board members.

Well I will tell you what HP knows, or more properly, what HP workers knew before they all got laid off by corporate know-nothings that destroyed their jobs. It's the same thing I know, what my highly educated co-workers know, what all of us unemployed know. It is the one thing that frustrates us the most. We know how to build a fucking empire. We know how because we already built one. And we know what's preventing us from doing that again, and who's responsible for it. And worst of all, we know we are powerless to do anything about it, and we are forced to sit idle and watch as the 1% raid what we built and suck all the money out, leaving us with nothing.

Just thinking out loud....

Yeah, and I'm just thinking out loud when I wish you could be unemployed for years and lose everything you own, everything you spent your whole life building, so you could understand what sort of ignorant bilge you just spouted off about.
posted by charlie don't surf at 12:00 PM on November 17, 2013 [79 favorites]

You really told those soapboxers, FauxScot. Keep standing up to the people spouting useless uninformed drivel with your clever insights that "could be wrong" but are incisively striking nerves!
posted by XMLicious at 12:03 PM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

I expect to hear that from Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, not on MeFi

"They should just..." comes up in every goddamn thread around here about the poor and underemployed. If you value your blood pressure and your hair, stay out of them.
posted by rtha at 12:07 PM on November 17, 2013 [12 favorites]

Anyone offering tips on how to navigate structural unemployment when the linked article specifically talks about how the problem is primarily cyclical, especially someone using the phrase "It apparently need [sic] restating that a clear understanding of economics is good personally", needs to be showing their work. The absence of sector-specific unemployment spikes means that this isn't just about people having the wrong skills, or not working hard enough to find the "needle" in the "haystack."

I guess it's easier to tell everyone else they're not looking hard enough than to show empathy and offer real solutions to the problem. Every man is the hero of his own story, I guess.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:25 PM on November 17, 2013 [11 favorites]

I find Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and their ilk repellant and plain disgusting. I do not want them on MeFi ( which is not very likely) but there should be a place for those who disagree with the majority on Mefi. This is a tough place to post dissent from the MeFi culture. The world of people, objects and most of life/nature is analog and falls on a continuum ( a nice bell shaped curve/normal distribution ) with the ugly, indifferent, great, failing, good, bad, strong, weak, noble, evil, short, poor and rich along nicely and predictably on that distribution.
posted by rmhsinc at 12:32 PM on November 17, 2013 [4 favorites]

I just got a job two weeks ago. Call center work. I spent ten years as a Windows admin for Citigroup, and then three years unemployed. The past two months I had a surge of interest, and then I'd do interviews and then nothing. (I had one place send me to the same place four times, on four different requests; two of them got me face to face interviews, and then again, no response afterwards. They called me last week. I told them that I did not trust them as they seemed to have some communications issues.)

I am making $14/hr. And I am ecstatic, despite the terrifying working conditions (clean desk policy from Hell; you have to put any bag you bring with you, and your coat, in a locker you can't see at all; NDA of terrifying restrictiveness), because for the first time since 2010, I am working. I have a two hour bus ride each way, but I am working. My savings are gone, my unemployment is gone, my parents are retired, I am 44 years old and in a job that's so far under my skill level that I can do it with my eyes closed, but I am finally working.

This company was so desperate they pulled in people who barely owned computers, and trained them in what they have to troubleshoot in a huge, high-speed ramp-up. But I'm working. I got my first paycheck on Friday, and it's already gone, into my bus pass and late bills and catching up on things I paid for. Thankfully my SNAP benefits came in before I started so I could afford things like breakfast and lunch. And because of the location, and because I'm on the bus, I had to leave at 11 PM the night before for a 5 AM start, and spend $4 (borrowed from a friend) at a Denny's nearby, just to have something to do for three hours until I could get in there.

But in the night, my wife and I both despair about my situation... but I need the job and I must think of us. I just wish I had something better... but then, they hire the employed, so now that I am...
posted by mephron at 12:35 PM on November 17, 2013 [18 favorites]

rmhsinc: "but there should be a place for those who disagree with the majority on Mefi."

There is, but you need to come correct. There are more than three unemployed people for every job opening right now, and telling people to try harder isn't going to create more job openings. I would love to see more people on MeFi with different ideas, but those ideas need to be supported with actual data, or at least links to supporting material from the people who study the actual data.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:45 PM on November 17, 2013 [11 favorites]

The reaction to the self-employment suggestion in this thread seems totally knee-jerk. It's not about advocating right-wing dogma, it's about saying if this is what the long-term unemployed are facing, what's the downside of at least trying to hang a shingle out there?? You're telling me that if you're facing a 1-3% callback rate, self employment isn't worth a go?

Also, I have a hard time buying the goal of a permanent underclass. It just doesn't benefit anybody. Even the richest don't gain from no one being able to afford their shit. What seems more likely is a combination of the following:

1) Supply-spiders and neo-liberalists drinking their own Kool-Aid about rising tides
2) The wealthy and privileged not being able to or needing to see past their own noses
3) No. 2 being happy to support No. 1 to their own (short term) benefit

I agree that it's the inevitable outcome, but inevitable doesn't always mean intended.
posted by dry white toast at 12:45 PM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

There is, but you need to come correct. There are more than three unemployed people for every job opening right now, and telling people to try harder isn't going to create more job openings. I would love to see more people on MeFi with different ideas, but those ideas need to be supported with actual data, or at least links to supporting material from the people who study the actual data.

I'm sorry, MeFi turned into a peer-reviewed academic journal exactly when?
posted by dry white toast at 12:48 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

It apparently need restating that a clear understanding of economics is good personally, but perhaps not professionally.

WTF does this even mean?
posted by Token Meme at 12:49 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

what's the downside of at least trying to hang a shingle out there??

Maybe it's the condescension involved in suggesting that people who are desperate to work haven't already tried it. The primary subject of the linked NYT piece is scraping by doing psychic reading type work, but it doesn't pay the bills.

All things being equal, everyone would love to be their own boss and make their own way, but there's a reason most people don't do it -- it's hard, it's unstable, and it doesn't cover any benefits. This is true even when times are good, and just because times are bad in the conventional employment market doesn't magically create self-employment opportunities.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:50 PM on November 17, 2013 [7 favorites]

dry white toast: " I'm sorry, MeFi turned into a peer-reviewed academic journal exactly when?"

There's a big difference between including links to sources to support your ideas and being an academic journal. If you just want to speak for your own benefit, then feel free to tell the world what you think, but if you want to do so without being challenged, get a blog and turn off the comments.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:52 PM on November 17, 2013 [6 favorites]

There is certainly someone out there who will hire you, despite the structural defects in the economy. Somewhere in that haystack sits the needle you seek. The proof of course, is that after a while, most folks find work.

It isn't true that there is someone out there who will hire "you," person who is thus far un-hired. Maybe that's because you've had bad luck and/or the deck is stacked against you. Or maybe you just aren't that employable, for whatever reason. Or maybe both, who knows. I don't personally care why you don't have a job, I'm not super invested in whether you get to do something you hate for the majority of your waking hours for a pittance that allows you a measure of terrifying, hand-to-mouth survival, it's seriously OK with me if you don't. That doesn't make you less of a person or less deserving of human dignity.

As a country, the US has the means to give everyone a place to sleep, food to eat, chances to socialize and learn, even a measure of safety and justice, but instead of shoring up the safety net and providing those things for our population *because we are human, not for a profit,* we (or certain segments of us) have decided to demolish the social safety net instead. To me, demolishing the safety net undermines the government's guiding goals, which are increasing fairness and access, in service of the goal of commerce, which is efficiency.

I'm not demonizing commerce or capitalism (though a part of me wants to), I'm saying the government has abandoned its role and is functioning now as though it's just a huge business, and that leaves a very dangerous vacuum in our society. The government is supposed to be our "group plan" as a country, our way of taking care of ourselves en masse because that's preferable to living in a Hobbesian hellhole. But we don't have that "group plan" anymore, and to get the scraps we need each of us is fighting not just against all the other individual suckers, but also against huge entities, like corporations and a government that has become a corporate wanna-be. We're all going to end up losers, we're all crabs in a bucket. This is INSANE.

Do you know that tax cuts represent a larger amount of "spent" government funds than all of discretionary funding combined, including defense? Maybe we should reverse some of those cuts, take away some of those deductions and give that revenue to people who need it to live humane lives. That is actually what taxation is *for,* by the way -- to produce and distribute the goods that make life in our country better as a whole, for everyone, which sometimes means giving cash to people who need it so they can continue to participate in our society. Maybe we shouldn't just leave people at the mercy of corporations who aren't in the business of anything but efficiency and have no interest (fair enough) in being humane. Why we play so nice, on a global level, with commerce is actually beyond me, though I can easily imagine the shortsighted venal and even pragmatic reasons for it.

The people who are cut out of the mainstream, which is bizarrely such a vast number of us at this point that I'm not even sure what the mainstream is anymore, some of them continue to try and be good little worker bees even without any work or frustratingly meager rewards. Great that they're still drinking the Kool-Aid, I guess? But lots of us aren't, especially those of us who never had much of a shot at the mainstream to begin with or who are more hardened against bullshit. All of those people, they still have needs, though, and so they commit crimes, they sell themselves under the table, they buy everything from utilities to protection from the black market, they basically form their own cynical, dangerous, mercenary mini-societies and give up hope of escaping from the margins, in order to get their needs met. The more people forced into the margins, the more people who will live like that, until that *is* the mainstream. Something I love about the US is, to me, it's actually a surprisingly idealistic, un-corrupt country. I love that in the US it's *not* usual to bribe a cop when he stops you, it's *not* socially acceptable to flout the law, cynicism and jadedness are *not* civic virtues. I love that, and I don't want to see it destroyed, but you can't live on the margins forever, you can't be denied your human needs forever and keep that idealism and trust, so I'm afraid that if we don't do something to give people more of a shot at getting their needs met through "legitimate," pro-social channels, we're going to destroy not just the lives of individuals, we're going to destroy the soul of our country, and change our culture indelibly for the worse.

I have a lot to say about the specifics but it's basically just angry rants about people equating human worth with earning potential, people's basic needs being denied, classes of people getting scapegoated, lives being made miserable for no reason but want of money, anti-social "ideals" (like greed) being lauded. But honestly, you guys have heard it, know plenty already. I have literal nightmares about this stuff all the time, everybody doesn't get short of breath when thinking about poverty, please think for a second about what a society looks like when money is the end all be all, when the only way to get respect or safety is to literally buy it in cash, and list the working, reliable safeguards that are in place to stop the US becoming entirely like that. The only true safeguard I can see are US social norms and ideals, which is why the adoption of pro-business, rent-seeking "greed is good" "worth is money" "profits above all" mentality gaining a deeper and deeper foothold in our society is such a big deal to me, and why I want to snatch the Kool-Aid out of all those good little worker bees' hands.
posted by rue72 at 12:58 PM on November 17, 2013 [38 favorites]

All things being equal, everyone would love to be their own boss and make their own way, but there's a reason most people don't do it -- it's hard, it's unstable, and it doesn't cover any benefits. This is true even when times are good, and just because times are bad in the conventional employment market doesn't magically create self-employment opportunities.

All those things are true. Also, it's not like every skill translates to self-employment.

But again, this has nothing to do with magic. It's about saying if you get a 10% uptake as a freelancer, you're still doing better than wide-spraying résumés.
posted by dry white toast at 1:00 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

I've been self-employed ever since I was let go from my last job eight years ago. I didn't want to be self-employed. But, at my age, and based on feedback from the handful of interviews I managed to land (subtle concerns about my age, and a lot of "you're overqualified" excuses) I really had no other choice. No one wants to hire a 50-plus-year-old, no matter the portfolio or the experience. It's simply cheaper to hire young. And it just gets worse year-after-year.

Thing is, despite the star-spangled propaganda we're constantly fed, being an "entrepreneur" is decidedly NOT something that is magically born into everyone. Quite honestly, I'm a terrible businessperson. I'm not aggressive. I'm not a go-getter. I hate like anything knocking on doors trying to drum-up business. It's just not in my blood. I'm better at sitting at my workstation and doing my best work for someone else. Sorry if that offends, but that's just the way it is. I'm not an American übermensch.

So, now I eke-out a marginal cash-flow thanks to the tiny handful of clients I have. Thankfully, my wife has a good stable job, and we can lean on her as the breadwinner.

Still, it's hard to accept having become, essentially, dead weight, after a lifetime of supporting a family through the quality of my work. Often is the work day when I sit here and think she'd be far better off without the cost of me, and cashing-in my life insurance.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:03 PM on November 17, 2013 [30 favorites]

Reading this, I wonder what do people who have kids think? I mean, if it's looking like a Mad Max world, and you are single or in a childless relationship, at worst you imagine yourself dying like a gladiator. But when you have kids, that option is foreclosed, because now you're responsible for those who depend on you, and you can't just go down in battle.

And then I wonder about something else. Does thinking about future employment, even if you are employed for the moment, give you pause when planning a family? My wife and I are childless by choice, so I can't speak from personal experience. Doesn't it terrify you to think: "OK, I have a job now, but what happens if I have a kid and then lose it all? There is no security. A child is a dream I must defer or even give up on."

Now, poor people had kids throughout history. But reliable+convenient+affordable contraception has not been around until the 60's. So these days you really can control - most of the time - your reproductive choices (despite the best efforts of assorted asshole politicians). Doesn't the pervasive job insecurity factor into these decisions? Or are we young and full of optimism and "somehow it'll work itself out"? Or is the need to have a kid so strong that we ignore these externalities?
posted by VikingSword at 1:07 PM on November 17, 2013

and just because times are bad in the conventional employment market doesn't magically create self-employment opportunities.

This. Because if the conventional employment market is bad, who is going to hire all these people creating their own companies to do the things they do?

Either people have money to spend, or they don't. If we want to seriously kick-start the economy, bring gasoline back down to $1/gallon, so people aren't spending 4x what they used to be spending just to get to work every day. All that extra money will find its way into the greater economy and will employ more people to do things. This will be true whether they are entrepreneurs or conventionally employed.

But that's not going to happen, is it? So, what do we do? Daily cost of living has removed discretionary spending from our economy.

Either we raise wages to where people have money they feel they can throw around on something other than survival, or else we live with the consequences. And mass unemployment is one of those consequences.
posted by hippybear at 1:07 PM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

But again, this has nothing to do with magic. It's about saying if you get a 10% uptake as a freelancer, you're still doing better than wide-spraying résumés.

I don't know what this 10% figure is supposed to mean. What is the numerator, and what's the denominator? If it's the number of times you get a freelance gig over the number of times you try, then one can increase that percentage to 100% by visiting Mechanical Turk and doing some menial writing task for next-to-nothing. But that's not going to pay the bills.

You're also neglecting the cost, in time and possibly money (neither of which the people hit hardest by the recession have a lot of), of going into business for yourself. The time that goes to pursuing this will take away from efforts to get a job elsewhere, and in many cases, this means foregoing a small but non-zero chance at a job that pays what they used to make for a chance at making less.
posted by tonycpsu at 1:08 PM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

crabs in a pot.
posted by ennui.bz at 1:16 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

Reading this, I wonder what do people who have kids think? I mean, if it's looking like a Mad Max world, and you are single or in a childless relationship, at worst you imagine yourself dying like a gladiator. But when you have kids, that option is foreclosed, because now you're responsible for those who depend on you, and you can't just go down in battle.

Dying like a gladiator isn't an option if your parents are broke, either.

There are all these articles about "boomerang" millennials and long-term unemployed/broke boomers, and very few about how those two things intersect. But in real life, they do.

Kids aren't the only vulnerable parties here.
posted by rue72 at 1:17 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

Also, I have a hard time buying the goal of a permanent underclass. It just doesn't benefit anybody.

Except the upper class in every society that has had a permanent underclass in human history?

Once you own nearly everything then risks to your wealth are no longer from business competition, because you own all of the business. Your risks are government policies and societal practices, like democracy, that can have outcomes adverse to the best interests of your wealth. So keeping most of the people in society on the edge and preoccupied by just trying to survive, and hence tractable and predictable, is very valuable indeed at that scale.

And when you're at the point where you have more wealth than you and all your kin could possibly consume in their entire lives, such stability is worth it even at the price of reducing the numbers on your balance sheet in absolute terms if it means that you can entrench your power further and end up with a bigger piece of the pie.

It doesn't have to be some explicit conspiracy made with handshakes in a back room; it's quite possibly just the aggregate of rational responses to the real risks such overwhelmingly dominant wealth faces.
posted by XMLicious at 1:19 PM on November 17, 2013 [29 favorites]

And a lot of the folks using it as a filter are not part of a class or a conspiracy. They're people who would rather be getting work done than filtering through a never ending pile of resumes, half of which are inappropriate for the job listing in the first place. (With increasing unemployment this seems to get worse - more people applying to any remotely relevant listing s well as people trying to make their quota of job applications for Unemployment)

I don't deny that there are policy and class issues that amplify the problem. But certainly not everyone in a hiring position is looking to keep the poor poor. Often they just want to find a competent, friendly coworker/employee and to get back to work.

I don't think anyone in a hiring position is actively looking to keep the poor in poverty. That would have nothing to do with their business. But a conspiracy against the unemployed is unnecessary. Employers naturally want people whose abilities are fresh, so they take people who haven't long been unemployed; middle-class people naturally feel more inclined to hire people who easily present as middle-class; and so on. The injustices often arise without any individual's conscious ill will.

The vast tide of applications only exacerbates the problem. You need to find a competent, friendly employee, and you need to get back to work, so you filter out scores of people using more or less arbitrary criteria. Those scores of people are as SOL elsewhere as at your company, because other companies are - coincidentally - using those same arbitrary criteria.

This is the kind of problem that only the government can alleviate - solving it is too much to hope for - but for various reasons, it won't. So the unemployed and unemployable grind on, hoping the boom will catch them if it comes.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 1:22 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

dry white toast: The reaction to the self-employment suggestion in this thread seems totally knee-jerk. It's not about advocating right-wing dogma, it's about saying if this is what the long-term unemployed are facing, what's the downside of at least trying to hang a shingle out there?? You're telling me that if you're facing a 1-3% callback rate, self employment isn't worth a go?

Why, I don't know why I didn't ever think of that! Oh, wait, it's because I don't have the equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that is needed to do my job, nor the fully-stocked lab that is required to utilize it. I also don't have the decades of experience necessary to run a lab like that, and I don't know of any particular local demand that could support the founding of such a lab anyway.

Seriously, the people who exist in fields where self-employment is an option know about it. But a lot of people are in fields where it absolutely isn't an option. Maybe the equipment is too expensive, or it's in a field where nobody uses consultants or freelancers, or the person don't have enough experience in the field to run a business successfully. However, it gets trotted out every time unemployment comes up.

Listen, most fields don't have freelancers! Not every career path is compatible with consulting or contract work! Most jobs aren't IT or graphics design, and self-employment either requires millions of dollars of founding capital to start an entirely new business, is contract work with crap pay and no benefits, or just plain doesn't exist. And the people who are in a field where it is an option know about it.
posted by Mitrovarr at 1:23 PM on November 17, 2013 [28 favorites]

And then I wonder about something else. Does thinking about future employment, even if you are employed for the moment, give you pause when planning a family? My wife and I are childless by choice, so I can't speak from personal experience. Doesn't it terrify you to think: "OK, I have a job now, but what happens if I have a kid and then lose it all? There is no security. A child is a dream I must defer or even give up on."

Part of the reason my wife and I don't want a house or kids is I spent 2007-20011 getting laid off every 6-12 months. We can't even agree to get a dog or cat because, well, if I get laid off, how do we pay for Fluffy/Fido's food and needs? How do we get Dog across the country if I have to move across the country again? I'm fortunate I have very few local ties and I am the kind of person that can come home and say "We're moving", pack the car, and be gone in a day (and she's the kind of person that can handle wrapping up our affairs in one city while I drive to the next and get us set up there). I'm fortunate I have the money (okay, I have the credit cards I can run up) set aside to do that. I talked to a guy from the Social Security office that was trying to track me down at one point for some money they owed me and he was like "Man, what did you do? Who are you running from?" And all I could say is this is my life, man, this is it.

And man, it scares the hell out of me that things could've been different if I'd made one wrong choice. Like in 2007 all my friends were buying houses and we were under so much pressure from all quarters, but I just had a funny feeling it couldn't last, so we didn't and were able to seize an opportunity that got us out of town when all my friends got laid off and were stuck in a shitty town with no jobs in houses they were upside down on.

So yeah, I am extremely fortunate I never bought a house or had a kid. Isn't that fucked up?

And yeah, I did the entrepreneurship thing. It took me a year of ramping up part-time in my off hours, so I did nothing but work 8 hours, then come home and work, then sleep. On weekends, I worked more. And I have a network of good contacts in my field and a good reputation. And, finally, my little bird got off the ground. Last time I got laid off, I had so much work coming in that going to job interviews was costing me money and an annoyance, so I just quit doing it and now, by the grace of god, I'm self employed.

Of course, if I ever take a week actually off, that magically all goes away. And I've had several potential lines of business fail but I had the cashflow to absorb the loss and learn from my mistakes. And my wife works a boring but stable job that provides us health insurance. And my 401k is currently in the triple digits, so "work til I die" is pretty much the plan, because I still have a ton of debt to pay off from my nomadic years. And I try not to think about what's going to happen when I get older because my field is definitely a young man's game and I know like nobody even in their 50s who's still in it. And I can never, ever stop hustling or take a break and man if I wind up sick or disabled, we are well and truly fucked.

So yeah, I bootstrapped myself and for my trouble I have to work til I die and may lose everything anyway and probably wouldn't even be eligible for unemployment when that happened and we're still a financial or medical crisis or two from homelessness and can't even get a dog or cat because at any point we may have to liquidate everything and move across the country again if we want to stay on the treadmill but the alternative is oblivion. Ain't America grand?
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 1:41 PM on November 17, 2013 [34 favorites]

What the heck are you talking about? The poorer people of the world have done very well over the last few decades.

Dang, dsfan, that is an amazing graph.

"It was probably the profoundest reshuffle of people’s economic positions since the industrial revolution."

So it's not just an American thing where the Republican Party deliberately squelched Keynesian stimulus spending that could've ameliorated all this long-term unemployment.
posted by kadonoishi at 1:44 PM on November 17, 2013

self-employment?

i suspect i see self-employed people all the time at the flea markets, selling second hand or knock off stuff off the books while they collect disability - sales aren't all that great, they look pretty damned poor, and i wonder just how long they can manage to work it out

basically, they're scavengers selling the remains of civilization to other poor people, because god knows this country can't think of a way to employ people enough making new stuff

i'm sure there's a lot of underground economy stuff going around that we simply don't see - odd jobs, that kind of thing

none of it really adds up to anything like a living wage, but what else can one do? - we've evolved into a society where your social status as an employee is regulated mercilessly by our corporate masters - right now, my employer demands 2 years of manufacturing experience before they even consider you - i've given them nearly 15 years of good service and i wouldn't even get in the door because of that today - and your criminal record better not even exist, because they won't hire you if you had a drunk driving conviction 20 years ago ... yeah, i know, it's probably illegal but who's going to prove it?

"enterprise needs no permission"? - no, it just needs access to tools and opportunity and what's out there is pretty damned meager

i had been thinking that i could be enterprising and try to get a job that might be a little easier on me, but i've pretty much given up on that idea - the job market is tight, my employer seems to be more likely, marketwise, to stay afloat than anything else i can think of - (big clue - NONE of the other places i used to work for are still in business) - i'm 56, which is a little more desirable than having leprosy, i suppose, in today's job market - and i'm doing a fair amount better than mere survival

so, i'm just hoping they stay in business and i stay sane and healthy for 6 more years, when at least i'll have a rather inadequate ss paycheck to fall back on, if i really don't have a choice

my options suck - your options probably suck too - our country's options suck

desperation needs no permission, either

but don't mind me - i'm just ranting ...
posted by pyramid termite at 1:45 PM on November 17, 2013 [4 favorites]

Also, I have a hard time buying the goal of a permanent underclass. It just doesn't benefit anybody

I believe the economic euphemism for desperation is precarity, and that really does benefit the neoliberal policies that create it. I am in my late 20s, and most of my friends are "Millennials". Almost every single person I know, regardless of what path they took in life or what career they aspire to in whatever field, are doing some kind of bullshit unpaid internship, working part time, being a gopher and 'social media consultant' for some shitty business that pays minimum wage, taking on extreme amounts of debt for grad school (hey, maybe the economy will be better in 2-4 years!), working for a temp agency, barely scraping by as a freelancers with no benefits or stable income, or just moving back in with their parents because what else are you going to fucking do?

My friends are the most educated, most indebted people I know, and there is jack fucking shit out there for them to do as far as a 'real' job goes. And what we have drummed into us is that we must be so fucking passionate about ____ that we're willing to be someone's bitch for years with no pay off or real income or even chance at advancing up. That internship you did for free doing some business' administrative work? There's no job waiting for you at the end of it, there's an endless line of other people who want that opportunity or experience. It's ok, we'll all be part of the sharing economy and rent our tiny apartments on AirBNB and drive strangers around for Uber when we're not Twittering for whatever business is trying to use us for free labor, it'll all work out! The stock market is up and the talking heads are saying the word 'recovery'!

I feel for the older people in this thread who are talking about being passed over for someone younger and cheaper, we are in the same boat. Kids or houses or marriage or even owning a fucking car? There are reasons young people have unilaterally given up on these markers of adulthood, it's because there is nothing permanent in our lives. I mean I already said upthread that I consider myself extremely lucky and privileged to be doing ok, but I think it says something that I consider being able to afford a Bronze level, subsidized health care plan an almost unimaginable pinnacle of success for someone in my peer group.
posted by bradbane at 2:09 PM on November 17, 2013 [40 favorites]

Also, I have a hard time buying the goal of a permanent underclass. It just doesn't benefit anybody.

It benefits the rich people who want to be/see themselves as little kings.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 2:13 PM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

Newsflash: There are these people called lobbyists. And everything they do is done on purpose. All of it is very intentional. And they are not lobbying for some working class unemployed person in Flint.

That, and it seems vanishingly unlikely that, with all the neoliberal think tanks out there created to do exactly this sort of thing, not a single one of them has ever put out a white paper about the upsides of chronic underemployment.

Yeah, guys. There is totally a conspiracy. Is it at the level of HR departments and fast food franchise owners? No. But of course it exists.
posted by Sara C. at 2:18 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

Part of the reason my wife and I don't want a house or kids is I spent 2007-20011 getting laid off every 6-12 months. We can't even agree to get a dog or cat because, well, if I get laid off, how do we pay for Fluffy/Fido's food and needs? How do we get Dog across the country if I have to move across the country again? I'm fortunate I have very few local ties and I am the kind of person that can come home and say "We're moving", pack the car, and be gone in a day (and she's the kind of person that can handle wrapping up our affairs in one city while I drive to the next and get us set up there).

This is me. I would love to have a dog. It would be a friend to love. But I'm terrified of being fired and having someone other than me to take care of.

I can't imagine being stupidly optimistic enough to buy a house, never mind have a child.
posted by winna at 2:35 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

Also, I have a hard time buying the goal of a permanent underclass. It just doesn't benefit anybody

I don't believe a permanent underclass is a goal. It's merely a by-product of a roughly 30+ year effort to migrate as much money as possible from the middle and lower classes, and into the pockets of the financial classes. The end-game of 21st-century capitalism is to accumulate as much wealth as possible, from whatever sources available. There is no consideration as to what this will do to society or the people in it. With enough wealth, one can be insulated from the effects.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:38 PM on November 17, 2013 [6 favorites]

Yeah, one of my friends has bought a house about an hour from a major city and is now looking at upgrading into one two hours from a major city and works at the only company that does what she does in her area and all I can think is SHEER TERROR because if that job falls through then she's looking at a 2 hour commute into town each way to even begin to find something. But I'm the lunatic and asshole if I say something like that so I keep quiet.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:41 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

What is her logic for that move? Even if the world weren't this new normal that would be an unwise plan.
posted by winna at 2:44 PM on November 17, 2013

HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE THIS HOUSE IS AMAZING, pretty much.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:44 PM on November 17, 2013 [4 favorites]

Does thinking about future employment, even if you are employed for the moment, give you pause when planning a family?

There was a time, decades ago, that I considered proposing marriage to my girlfriend. But another recession had begun, I had a hard time finding work and I was accumulating debt. The thought of attaching my debts and my poor prospects to the woman I loved seemed cruel beyond measure. We drifted apart, and I never allowed myself to think of marriage again.

Until a few months ago. I met a beautiful young woman at my crappy temp job. We were both desperately poor. She told me how she sold blood plasma to make extra money to buy food. I had nightmares about being attached to machines and having my life essence sucked out of my body. It upset me so much, I begged her to stop. I told her if she was that desperate, I'd pay her not to donate plasma. Which of course was utterly ridiculous, I was just as penniless as she was, and we both knew it. I didn't even have the money to take her out for a cup of coffee.

On the day after Valentine's Day, she told me she spent the evening giving blood plasma. I wrote a short story about it, I called it "The Valentine Donor." It's kind of like that O Henry Story, The Gift of the Magi, where she cuts and sells her long hair to buy him a watch fob, and he sells his pocket watch to buy her a comb for her hair. Except in my version, she spends Valentine's Day selling blood plasma, while just outside, I lay dying in the street, bleeding to death in a car accident.

The desperation of poverty kept us apart. We were both laid off, and while I struggled to survive two months off until our next assignment, she suddenly told me she found a job in another city as a nanny. Apparently college educated nannies are a status symbol amongst the 1%, who can afford to squander the peak years of a woman's career on their toddlers, just as easily as they could light a cigar with a hundred dollar bill. And the thought of this young woman raising someone else's family, when she is childless and deserves to be raising her own, fills me with the emptiness of sensing another lifetime that could have been, that should have been, but now would never be.

When I think back, the burdens that first stopped me from marriage are almost trivial compared to the problems I face today. I could have handled them, but I didn't know that then. Nor does my poor woman friend understand she could survive them too. When I met her at work, I asked her the same question I usually ask when I meet people at work, how the hell did you end up in this crappy job, and what are you supposed to be doing instead? She told me she her plans, and how they were ruined because she graduated two months after 9/11. I was enraged over her lost decade. I thought back to Hunter S. Thompson's essay When War Drums Roll, written days after 9/11.

We are At War now, according to President Bush, and I take him at his word. He also says this War might last for "a very long time."

Generals and military scholars will tell you that eight or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history -- which is no doubt true -- but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a war-time economy are going to feel like a Lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed.

That is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks.

I was at that party, I remember it. She is younger than me, and wasn't at the party. Perhaps it is better she doesn't know what it was like, to live and work in a bubble of prosperity, and watch it pop. Perhaps it is better to live in a world of lowered expectations, not fully understanding how our futures were squandered and the economy wrecked. HST is right, this is extremely heavy news. It was so heavy, he could not endure it. I don't know how any of us can endure it.
posted by charlie don't surf at 2:50 PM on November 17, 2013 [40 favorites]

I am self-employed and have been off and on for about the last 7 or 8 years. If you work in the right industry and are good at your job, it can be really easy to take it for granted. My experience of looking for work is so vastly different today than what it was 10+ years ago that unless I take the time to read about other people's experiences, I can't really remember how hard and terrifying it can be. My last search took 1 day and I got the first and only job I sent my resume to. I worked really hard to get here, but my success has been as much luck as anything else. If your experience is anything like mine, and you can get work easily on a self-employment or employee basis, you should think really hard about making glib suggestions in snappy soundbites to people who work in different industries or have different skills. If your experience is anything like mine, you live inside a strange oasis of technology and your access to work is unique (and you should respect that it is probably ephemeral, as well).
posted by feloniousmonk at 2:54 PM on November 17, 2013 [6 favorites]

charlie don't surf, I graduated the spring after 9/11 as well, and in the intervening years have been unemployed for only two weeks. I realize I am lucky, but I don't agree with your assessment that there was ever a party that ended.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 2:57 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

There is certainly someone out there who will hire you, despite the structural defects in the economy. Somewhere in that haystack sits the needle you seek. The proof of course, is that after a while, most folks find work.

This is a myth, just like the myth that there is "one true love" for everyone out there, they just have to search better, and about as useful. *eye roll*
posted by _paegan_ at 2:59 PM on November 17, 2013 [12 favorites]

People are chronically unemployed. Better blame capitalism in general, even though socialist Europe is worse off.
posted by colinshark at 3:08 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

roomthreeseventeen, as I said, perhaps it is better for you not to know what the party was like, so you do not understand what you missed, and what you are missing now.
posted by charlie don't surf at 3:13 PM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

Well, I didn't just pop out of nowhere at 21. I did live in the United States, and for many people, there was no party here.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 3:14 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

That's the funny thing about capitalism: there's nobody in charge.

Boy, you sure got that part right.

In their sties with all their backing
They don't care what goes on around
In their eyes there's something lacking

I'm keeping my fork sharp.
posted by Twang at 3:19 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

Better blame capitalism in general, even though socialist Europe is worse off.

The idea that there are of course two systems, wholly independence and separate and opposed, well. I don't even know how to respond.

"What do you think the Russians talk about in their Councils of State? Karl Marx?"
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:32 PM on November 17, 2013 [4 favorites]

Anybody who thinks Europe is "socialist" doesn't know a goddamned thing about capitalism or socialism and should keep their ignorant fucking mouths shut.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:35 PM on November 17, 2013 [23 favorites]

I graduated a few months before 9/11 and I super lucked out, even though I got laid off after 9/11. I fell into a job in a relatively stable place and am liked enough to be kept on past when I should have been laid off a few more times by now. I am just so fucking lucky. I need to remember that every time my current job that I'm unlikely to be laid off from is sucking my brain out. I have no qualifications or talents in much of anything other than typing. I don't qualify for 99% of the jobs I look at because you have to have already done the job before you get hired for it.

Honestly, I think I would be suicidal if I lost my job. As in seriously, there is no hope for me, I'm worthless, I'll never work again, the only way out is death sort of way.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:37 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

“The point of who exactly? The cabal of just-above-minimum-wage McDonald's restaurant managers who secretly run the American economy?”

Yeah, it’s not like the Walton family are the richest family in the world. Like they’re influencing lawmakers in some way to benefit from the way laws are written. I mean, how could a closely knit small group of people with common economic interests and vast amounts of wealth possibly influence ideologically deluded and/or mercenary politicians into tailoring bills to suit their interests, like having taxpayers subsidize low wage employers so they can pay people less and make more profit?
Tinfoil hat time.

McDonald’s too. Like they’re going to set up some sort of front organization that pretends to be an independent certifying body, but relies on lax agricultural law to avoid addressing wage increase issues?

Pfft. Why would a corporation oppose increases in labor costs? There’s only millions and millions of dollars at stake. Makes no sense that they would callously and duplicitously trash people's lives just to be more wealthy.
Well, unless one has the slightest understanding of human greed and systemic corruption. Then yeah.

I’ve got a buddy who has two doctorates (one in Aerospace engineering. He’s literally a rocket scientist). He’s an older guy though, and has some health issues (depression, etc. his wife died) so he can’t get a job doing anything. He’s either “overqualified” (meaning they don’t want to pay him) or he’s just not getting called back (meaning they don’t like when someone gets depressed for some bizarre reason after losing a spouse). The guy isn’t a one trick pony either. He’s written a book. Acted. Done sales, PR, been a medic. He can out-think almost anyone without even warming his brain up. No job for him though. People who produce things, no good. Only real work left is exploiting the system, stealing from it, or covering it up.

Hell, even the lawyers are going hungry.

It’s like we’re in the last stages of a game of Monopoly. Y’know where someone has hotels on the red and yellow properties and is housing the greens and owns all the railroads and it’s just a long slow pointless decline into dice rolling against the inevitable.
posted by Smedleyman at 3:38 PM on November 17, 2013 [57 favorites]

To add:“Low-wage companies have choices. They can continue making a lot of profits, and can continue paying their CEOs an incredible amount of money by paying low wages to their employees. But they have the resources to operate profitably and pay high wages as well.”
posted by Smedleyman at 4:00 PM on November 17, 2013 [5 favorites]

Honestly, I think I would be suicidal if I lost my job. As in seriously, there is no hope for me, I'm worthless, I'll never work again, the only way out is death sort of way.

In a perverse way, I'm glad I'm in debt to the Department of Education and Sallie Mae, because I know that if I killed myself, my family (strictly speaking, my grandparents, who co-signed my loans) would have to take on my debt. It would be bad enough to rob my parents of a son, but it would be even worse to leave them with a five-figure debt on top of that. So I keep going, though I don't expect anything to get better.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 4:03 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

This is just not a realistic depiction of the last 30 years of economic policy and results, at all. American unemployment rates have been for the most part substantially better than those in other developed countries, see here for harmonized unemployment rates compared to other large developed economies. What we have in America is a severe recession which has been aggravated by very poor macroeconomic policy in the past four years, including an overly tight monetary stance and excessively rapid deficit reduction.

I agree that unemployment rates in the US are actually lower than in other developed Western countries. The unemployment rate in Spain and Greece is over 25%, and over 12% for the Eurozone as a whole (compared to 7.3% in the US). Youth unemployment is staggering - in Spain for example, over 55% of people under 25 in the labor force are unemployed.

However, US monetary policy in the last four years has been anything but tight. As another commenter pointed out, nominal interest rates are zero, and Yellen is expected to keep them there for a few years to come. The Fed has pumped money into the economy on an unprecedented scale through QE, and only now is considering slowing the pace. It has been argued that one of the primary causes of the 2000's real estate bubble and subsequent financial crisis was that the Greenspan Fed was too loose for too long.

I was recently unemployed, and I definitely perceived that I wasn't being considered for jobs because of my jobless status - if not outright rejected on that basis, it certainly made me less competitive against those who had jobs. Discrimination against the unemployed is a nasty thing - it causes a vicious cycle, and is negative for our economy as workers gradually lose their skills or give up altogether. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to prevent employers from doing it.
posted by pravit at 4:13 PM on November 17, 2013

Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to prevent employers from doing it.

It shouldn't matter that you can't, because the government should be hiring the unemployed directly, as another use pointed out upthread -- although they missed the crucial step of expropriating corporate capital in order to do so.
posted by junco at 4:29 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

Any normally honest Mefite who is happy to lie on their resume just to get any job, is welcome to memail me for a bogus reference.
posted by Kerasia at 4:37 PM on November 17, 2013 [21 favorites]

The unemployment rate in Spain and Greece is over 25%, and over 12% for the Eurozone as a whole (compared to 7.3% in the US).

Everyone quotes U3, when U6 is a much more comprehensive statistic: it is currently at 13.8%.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 4:41 PM on November 17, 2013 [6 favorites]

More and more, I'm thinking that some kind of guaranteed minimum income is the only humane way to go. (Switzerland wants to implement "paychecks for pulses.")

Right now, are more people who want to work than there is work to be had. (Hence the bias against age, race, etc. because employers can afford to be picky.) And good jobs are even scarcer, even for people with graduate degrees. (The last time I recall a truly bountiful job market was in the dot-com era of the late 90's to 2001.) A guaranteed minimum income would at least keep people from being homeless and starving, and give them some dignity. (And it would enable workers to start thumbing their noses at truly horrible jobs.)

I surmise that a guaranteed minimum income might actually create more jobs and have more people working, first because people could afford to buy things, and second because of a boom in self-employment. Not everyone can or should become self-employed, but with the safety net of a guaranteed minimum income there would be more willing to take the risk.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 4:45 PM on November 17, 2013 [8 favorites]

what's the downside of at least trying to hang a shingle out there??

As I already mentioned, to hang a shingle out would cost me, say, $3000 or so minimum. If I am a long-unemployed accountant and I do this and fail, I am now a long-unemployed accountant with either additional debt or considerably less cash in the bank to help to augment massively insufficient unemployment payments. I increase my chances of ending up bankrupt and homeless. That's a big deal. The chances of failure without several thousand more dollars to shove into marketing and rent for a proper office are very, very high. Especially without the CPA certification, which is going to cost even more to obtain if you don't have it already. It is extremely normal for entrepreneurs to empty out their retirement accounts to start a business--and extremely normal to still fail. The economy's still in a slump and it can take a year or even many years to start actually earning enough to pay just for your expenses, much less your own salary.

And that's with something that's actually fairly normal to do self-employed. I have no idea how you're supposed to just "hang out a shingle" if you're a customer service rep or a middle manager or any number of other jobs that only exist because of the need to interface with large corporations. But even if it's not just a ridiculous proposition to start, it's incredibly high-risk and is not a good place to be if you're already living on the edge of financial collapse. Recommending it to people who are not in a position to take those financial risks is incredibly irresponsible.
posted by Sequence at 4:50 PM on November 17, 2013 [13 favorites]

> even though socialist Europe is worse off.

You clearly don't know what the word "socialist" means - but I also think you have no idea what Europe is like if you think things are worse off.

What you do not understand is that "working class" in Europe (and Canada, Australia, etc) are protected from worst blows of the invisible hand.

Everyone gets health care - affordable, high-quality health care. Just the fact that society is willing to work hard to keep you alive no matter who you are - as opposed to the United States - completely blunts the worst downside of being poor.

Almost as important, you have protection from the exploitative and inhumane labor treatment that Americans in the bottom 50% routinely receive. Jobs must pay a living wage; they can't steal your time as they so often do here; the idea of "at will employment" is inconceivable.

Finally, if you do end up unemployed, you almost certainly won't end homeless and penniless - because there's an actual safety net. Yes, this net is strained thin in many countries - but it still works.

Don't get me wrong. I spent time in Greece with family this summer - the situation is quite dire there, and the outlook for the youth bleak. But there isn't the same level of personal anxiety you feel in the United States - where each individual rationally fears failing, falling off the bottom and dying in the street - instead, people fear more for the future of their society as a group (as we all should be doing).

The fact that numerical indices like unemployment are higher in some (but certainly not all) European countries than the United States as a whole most certainly doesn't mean that the poor in these countries are "worse off" than they are here.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 4:51 PM on November 17, 2013 [28 favorites]

Even in the lines of work where it's "easy" to go self-employed, it's only easy by comparison to other fields. Take web design for instance. Very little overhead, not much in the way of startup fees in most places if you go Sole Proprietorship and skimp on legal and accounting help and various types of insurance (which you should not do, but you're very lucky if you can afford it starting out).

But first, you need to build a portfolio of paid work to be taken seriously and get paid work. If you're lucky, you've got something - but not everyone is lucky. Maybe the bulk of your paid work has been for companies who preferred a look that's horribly dated by contemporary standards and honestly just bad design (hello unnecessary home page slideshows) that they chose over the shiny fresh things you mocked up for them initially, so you look dated based on that. Maybe you can't even show your work, because the company has since changed their look again, or because you're great at this stuff but you haven't had the opportunity to do it in a professional capacity, or (and this happens a lot with designer-developers) the work is proprietary property of previous employers so you can't show much if any of it.

So you need to take what work you can get to build an attractive, contemporary portfolio - unfortunately, a surefire way to kill your business' momentum is to take any clients you can at low prices, but unless you're very lucky, that's exactly what you'll have to do to build a working portfolio, especially with your bank account growing smaller by the day. So you grind for months to find a few willing clients, then grind for longer to produce a few showpieces. The word-of-mouth promotion you get from them is worthless (and word of mouth is your bread and butter) because the first good thing they'll say about you is how cheap you were. And odds are good that clients willing to pay only pennies on the dollar won't have the aesthetics of the clients you'd like to attract and won't require any of your more advanced skills, so your portfolio might still be worthless for attracting worthwhile clients.

And that's just one of the little crazy, timewasting games you have to play before you can start earning. There's also the lovely little getting stiffed on payment game that you'll likely be playing because you couldn't afford legal help, and the "oh shit, now I'm sick, can't work for a week and just ran up a medical bill" game.

All together, things like this amount to an insane slog of constant work for nothing you can live on, even for a capable self-starter who's exceptional at this stuff, and it's even more ludicrous for the average person. And that's just for self employment in an "easy" field. At the end of the day, the stars still have to align just right for you in any self-employment venture, and any plan where you need that to happen isn't much of a plan unless you're lucky enough to be so insulated from risk that you can afford to wait it out - which you almost always can't, if your reason for going self-employed is that you need a job now.
posted by jason_steakums at 5:53 PM on November 17, 2013 [15 favorites]

HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE THIS HOUSE IS AMAZING, pretty much.

Welcome to the past five years in Canada.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 6:23 PM on November 17, 2013

dry white toast: "t's not about advocating right-wing dogma, it's about saying if this is what the long-term unemployed are facing, what's the downside of at least trying to hang a shingle out there?? You're telling me that if you're facing a 1-3% callback rate, self employment isn't worth a go?"

I work at an underground mine. I'd say 70% of the jobs there are not the sort of thing you can hang a shingle out for. Jobs like miner, explosive worker, specialized heavy equipment operator, metallurgy technologist. This isn't something you can work at as an independent freelancer. But say your a trades person, maybe electrician. Sure you can setup your own electrical contracting company but you are going to need tens of thousands of dollars in seed money.

Around here a maintenance electrician would need to sit for his electrical contracting license (which requires taking a course and significant study) and post a significant bond before you are even legally allowed to work independently. Then you'd need significant tools that your employer previously provided, insurance, a vehicle that will haul pipe and ladders, a business license and a phone. All before you can do just about anything legally( you can preform non-regulated work like changing light bulbs, switches and breakers without a contractors licence). And you'd be at a disadvantage against every established company because you don't have a business history to draw references from so you'd be on a cash basis with your suppliers for at least a year while your competitors are able to charge for material NET 30.
posted by Mitheral at 6:24 PM on November 17, 2013 [11 favorites]

People are chronically unemployed. Better blame capitalism in general, even though socialist Europe is worse off.

How about we blame Germany's ability to impose an artificially tight money supply on the rest of the eurozone, a thing which actually exists, instead of your imaginary unitary European socialism, a thing which has never actually existed?
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 6:31 PM on November 17, 2013 [9 favorites]

"People" being against "socialism" just tells me they're not actually people, they're sociopaths.
posted by maxwelton at 6:51 PM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

I haven't had a regular job since I left a job to go back to college, thinking I would emerge with a diploma and more job opportunities. I was 38 years old and only had a high school diploma and a tech-school certificate for some pretty outdated computer programming skills. I'd been hearing my whole life that to get better jobs I'd need a college degree.

So my first job out of college was a six month job as a campaign worker. Field Organizer on the Barack Obama campaign. Then I worked for two months for a small business that went belly-up. Then eight months as a $9.00 per hour office clerk. Then six months of being on unemployment for the first time in my life. It ran out quickly, and I was lucky to get on as a Census Enumerator for a few months in 2010. $14.00 per hour. Not bad.

Being somewhat bootstrappy, and having some minor local political connections from my 2008 campaign work, I hustled work as a "political consultant" for a couple of municipal campaigns. That got me through Nov. of 2010.

2011 I worked for a few months on a crew doing weatherization of low-income houses. Four months in and I was in a car accident and injured such that I was injured to the point that working that physically demanding job was very difficult for me. I hung my bootstrappy shingle out again and worked as a campaign manager for a municipal candidate through the 2012 August Primary. Then October through Election Day 2012 I was back on Team Obama for Round 2.

I haven't had a job since. I've cleaned my sister-in-law's house a couple of times for a few dollars. I've applied to do all kinds of stuff. My resume is full of political stuff, which means a lot of employers do not want to touch me. If I leave that out, I'm left with 2-months here, 6-months there. I'm hoping to find some campaign work again soon. I've had a few coffees with potential candidates.

It maybe would be somewhat easier if I was young, and single, and able to move. There's political work available elsewhere if I were able to travel. Maybe. But I have two kids in high-school. My wife is holding down part-time 2 jobs. Our health insurance from COBRA is about to run out just in time for Obamacare, though I live in a red state with a governor and legislature that is fighting the ACA tooth-and-nail.

I don't believe it when I hear that unemployment is going down and the economy is getting better. Maybe for someone. Not for me or anyone I know. Everyone I know is struggling to keep low-paying jobs with no benefits, just because it's better than nothing.

It's fuckin' crazy. The middle class disappeared. The working-class seems to be too. What's going to be left? Should I just tell my kids: "Fuck it. Don't bother with college. I know we've been saying you should go. But fuck it. There's not going to be anything left for you anyway. Get your degree and work for $7.00 an hour making tacos and be happy about it. And don't have kids. 'Cause they're gonna get it even worse"

"Or think about going into business selling torches and pitchforks. I have a feeling it's going to be a growth industry real soon."
posted by Cookiebastard at 7:08 PM on November 17, 2013 [11 favorites]

I count at least five excellent comments (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) (on preview, 6) from people with firsthand experience being self-employed or working with people who were looking to become self-employed. If you're not convinced by these, let me try another angle.

This chart shows unincorporated self-employment in the United States from 1950 until (roughly) present day. I think the trend line is pretty clear, but the big deal to me is how consistent that trend line is throughout decades of booms, busts, and just about every other economic condition you can imagine. It does appear that some earlier recessions (shaded areas on the graph) put upward pressure on self-employment, but that trend is nowhere to be found in the past two recessions, and even during past recessions, the bump is just a percentage point, maybe two percent at most.

More importantly, regardless of what happens in the recessions, the percentage of self-employed continues trending downward to this day. Even if we were to somehow reverse this six-decade historical trend, we'd have to basically double our current rate of self-employment to get unemployment measures levels down to acceptable levels, and I'm thinking that the people who are currently self-employed wouldn't care much for a sudden doubling of the amount of competitors fighting for their customers. I can't imagine there's that much latent demand out there just waiting for millions of new entrepreneurs to tap into it.
posted by tonycpsu at 8:02 PM on November 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

It is so, so sad to me that humanity has innovated some of the most staggeringly awesome things-- humanism! science! medicine! art!-- yet also gone full-globe on this horrible capitalism thing. You can argue that these advances were precipitated by capitalistic principles, and I'm not knowledgeable enough to adequately engage that argument, but what I do know is that however we got here, we now have the raw resources and human capacity to make just societies that are fucking incredible. But it doesn't look like that's going to happen. Things could be so different.
posted by threeants at 8:36 PM on November 17, 2013 [7 favorites]

what's the downside of at least trying to hang a shingle out there??

or you can discover that you really suck at it.
posted by lester's sock puppet at 8:40 PM on November 17, 2013

The phrase that keeps going through my head these past few years is "This is what it's like to live in a dying empire".

I feel like the US has a lot to learn from the UK in its own post-imperial era: how you can do well, or not do well, by dealing with your loss of empire. Of course, that would require people to actually learn from history. And to have time to process this situation, while dealing with all the anxiety that the situation itself produces.
posted by jiawen at 8:49 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

The phrase that keeps going through my head these past few years is "This is what it's like to live in a dying empire".

And the kicker is when you consider the truth in threeants' comment, we don't have to be - we have the capabilities to be the America of myth, the shining beacon of light and humanity, all that stuff that's bandied about in a lot of words but so few deeds. But that doesn't turn as quick a buck, and it's been money and power over lofty ideals from the start, so that's nothing new. Plus it's all a bit too "socialist" for some to try to live up to America's own aspirational mythology.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:58 PM on November 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

I count at least five excellent comments (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) (on preview, 6) from people with firsthand experience being self-employed or working with people who were looking to become self-employed. If you're not convinced by these, let me try another angle.

I'm not sure how I got lumped in there with your comment links, since I didn't really talk about self-employment. But now that you mention it..

One of the things that irritates me most about working at low wage jobs with the marginally employed is that they all have side businesses. They would all like to become independent, doing some job that sounds to me like an unprofitable hobby. There's one woman who comes to work with a box full of her handmade soaps. They are brown, crude and ugly, and judging by her hygiene, and her continual jabbering about her allergy to perfumes and fluoride in the water, I don't want to go near her. Another woman offers tailoring. Too bad I can't afford to pay to fix the holes in my clothes. I am trying to learn how to darn holes myself. Another coworker sells Herbalife. Even if it wasn't a pyramid scam, health food products (yeah right) are a luxury the poor cannot afford. Another person sells high markup candies and big metal cans of caramel corn from a catalog. None of us can afford to by candies. But hey once in a rare while the Food Bank has expired luxury chocolates from the local gourmet food store (don't eat the expired cookies, they taste like ammonia). One woman always tacks up her business cards on the bulletin board, advertising her services as a realtor. Are you fucking kidding me? If you were a good realtor, you wouldn't be stuck in this shitty job, you'd be a realtor.

The parade of broken dreams goes on and on. It never ceases to irritate me when people promote their personal businesses in the workplace. I'm not there as a captive audience for you to pitch your products to. I am here to do a fucking job, get a paycheck, and get out of there. But amongst this parade, there is one broken dream that irritates me the most: the guys who talk about their jobs in this facility, as their key to financial salvation. Somehow that financial salvation doesn't primarily involve shutting the fuck up and going back to work, and allowing me to do the same. It seems to primarily involve endless discussions about how to stretch your time between paychecks during temporary layoffs, by using unemployment benefits. It involves going to the food bank and entering their electric bill lottery, 10 bills paid each month, max $100 once a year, a hundred people show up to get in the lottery. It involves applying going to our County Department of Human Services for medicare and when things really get bad, General Relief paid by the county (Max $2500 benefits per two year period, paid directly to landlords, utilities, and medical bills). It involves making applications to LIHEAP, the Energy Assistance Program to pay your heating bills during the winter and guarantee you won't get disconnected when it's 10 below zero, and making complex payment schedules to refinance your overdue power bills. And let me not even get into the things I've done to stall my landlord.

I learned all these things from my coworkers. I have done all these things, just as they have. You would think that this effort could be applied to something productive, instead of leeching benefits off the State, which is essentially subsidizing the corporation I work for, which could really afford to hire us full time, but keeps us enslaved as temp workers. You would think I work for Walmart or some soulless corporation that is notorious for low wages and taxpayer bailouts. But I work for a prestigious non-profit educational institution, they have more money than they know what to spend. And yet I am forced to sit through Powerpoint presentations in All-Hands meetings, announcing initiatives to increase productivity and cut costs wherever possible, with a goal of "finding $5 Million to reinvest in ourselves." That's a direct quote. What the fuck does that mean? They're not investing in my wages, that's for damn sure. I'd just be happy if they invested a couple hundred more bucks a month on janitorial services for the bathrooms.

I am ashamed that I am reduced to relying on social welfare mechanisms when I am perfectly capable of supporting myself IF the company would pay us a living wage. I don't have a side job. I have a job. I give it the same effort as if I was working a $100k/yr job, maybe more. Just because I only make about $14k a year doesn't mean I can take it any less seriously. My lazy stupid coworkers beg me to slow down and work less, because it makes them look bad. Fuck no, they should look bad. Shut the fuck up and get back to work, and leave me alone. And take your soaps and your Herbalife and your candy with you. I get rehired because I am one of the most productive employees. The distractions from you pitching your side job, are decreasing my productivity and risking my only job. I will work myself to death at this job, willingly, even trying to convince myself I work happily, and try not to think of portable defibrillators at the First Aid stations as a job benefit. I hope someone knows how to operate them.
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:29 PM on November 17, 2013 [14 favorites]

Unemployment becomes a “sorting criterion,”

The obvious answer here is that those of us on the employee side of the equation should start up dozens of fake companies, that have people do minimal work for minimum wage. As soon as you get laid off, you take a "job" with Fakey McFakerson & Co that has you do some kind of vaguely realistic work you can talk about on your resume. It doesn't have to be that convincing, just enough that you can have a truthful resume that doesn't get thrown away by HR.

If HR is going to use simple heuristics, I don't see why we can't game those heuristics.
posted by miyabo at 10:02 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

The biggest reason I've decided that, if I do go back to freelancing (and, ugh, it's in the cards but I'm trying not to think about it), I absolutely must have a fictitious business name/DBA name to do business under instead of using my own is that gaps filled with freelancing might as well be filled with unemployment for all the good they do you on resumes. I've gotten a lot of "tell me more about what you did at company x and company y" but not one question about freelance work where I've learned more than I did at the jobs they want me to talk about.
posted by jason_steakums at 10:24 PM on November 17, 2013

I'd say 70% of the jobs there are not the sort of thing you can hang a shingle out for. Jobs like miner, explosive worker, specialized heavy equipment operator, metallurgy technologist. This isn't something you can work at as an independent freelancer.

I don't work in a mine, but when I run through the list of occupations and skills in my workplace I reach the same conclusion -- good fucking luck going into business on your own without totally reinventing yourself.

And I think that's true for many of us. I'm happy for the programmers and tutors and whomevers who can hang out a shingle and get work. But an awful lot of professions rely on a structure to make sense -- if you are a riveter on a factory line, printing up business cards saying "freelance riveter" won't get you very far.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:31 PM on November 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

Honestly, I think I would be suicidal if I lost my job. As in seriously, there is no hope for me, I'm worthless, I'll never work again, the only way out is death sort of way.

Right there with you, to be honest.

Except that my position is more: "went back to school in 2009, hoping that a couple of years of school would let the newly-elected Democrats turn this thing around some. Graduated in 12/2011. Still looking. Don't expect to find." Feeling like that only got me more student loan debt.

My last interview was ... about a year ago. I haven't even gotten back so much as a phone call, since, and since my schooling resume is all telecom/IT, I don't expect to see one.

I mean, heck, the school's graduating another 30 or so guys in that field every six months. There's guys with fresher experience out there behind me already.

Meanwhile, no minimum wage job will return my calls, either. Too qualified for those, apparently.

Have been struggling with a gradual depressive spiral for years now, basically getting by with the assistance of friends and family. I'm grateful as hell that Obamacare's finally going live, so I can see about finding help with that, as that's only making the employment problem harder.

I dunno what to do, but I know this thread is all about right where I am.
posted by Archelaus at 1:36 AM on November 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

My lazy stupid coworkers beg me to slow down and work less, because it makes them look bad.

there used to be a saying in soviet russia - "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work"

it's amazing how, after the cold war and all our anti-socialist drama, how we're getting closer and closer to the reality of that "worker's paradise"

this is a system that is falling apart and everyone knows it except for the deluded that are running things and the fawning idiots who cheerlead them
posted by pyramid termite at 2:15 AM on November 18, 2013

I'm really surprised to see folks with IT or programming experience in this thread. Everyone I know in the field is either rejecting a dozen recruiters a month or desperately looking to find good candidates to hire and usually both. I can rationally understand that things must not be quite as rosy once you leave major metropolitan areas but it's still hard for me to really grok.
posted by Skorgu at 6:06 AM on November 18, 2013

My lazy stupid coworkers beg me to slow down and work less, because it makes them look bad. Fuck no, they should look bad. Shut the fuck up and get back to work, and leave me alone.

You shouldn't be so surprised that your employer is willing to pay you shit wages, since it's obviously not that hard to find fools willing to "work themselves to death" for said wages. You've learned a lot from your coworkers already. Stop judging them by the puritanical, self-serving standards of your employers and learn this from them as well. Your employer operates on the Pirates of the Caribbean Principle. You should, too.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 6:17 AM on November 18, 2013 [8 favorites]

I'm just going to keep repeating it.

In a Corporatist economy, high unemployment is not a problem. It's a solution.
posted by Legomancer at 7:25 AM on November 18, 2013 [6 favorites]

One of the things that irritates me most about working at low wage jobs with the marginally employed is that they all have side businesses. They would all like to become independent, doing some job that sounds to me like an unprofitable hobby.

How dare those crabs try to leave your humble bucket.
posted by sparklemotion at 7:35 AM on November 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

Somehow the problem is always the crabs and not the heat.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:12 AM on November 18, 2013 [11 favorites]

All the people in the article were over 50. It's age discrimination.
posted by cass at 9:12 AM on November 18, 2013

Reading this thread has made me consider myself among the lucky. Even though I'm being paid the same amount I made 10 years ago. I know if I lose this job, it's unlikely that I'll be able to find one again. I'm pushing 40 and running up against the wall where it's simply cheaper for companies to hire someone 10 years younger than me.

I've never been promoted, so I don't have a title like "Senior" to distinguish myself from other bog standard graphic designers.

To answer another question in the thread, We have a soon-to-be 2 year old. We went through a few rough years where it seemed like we wouldn't be able to afford to have a kid. But our fortunes changed, so we decided fuck it, we're going to try to have a life. Maybe not the path of prudence, but here we are. Time and fortune hasn't allowed us to have more than one child, though.
posted by Fleebnork at 9:18 AM on November 18, 2013

I am ashamed that I am reduced to relying on social welfare mechanisms when I am perfectly capable of supporting myself IF the company would pay us a living wage. I don't have a side job. I have a job. I give it the same effort as if I was working a $100k/yr job, maybe more. Just because I only make about $14k a year doesn't mean I can take it any less seriously. My lazy stupid coworkers beg me to slow down and work less, because it makes them look bad. Fuck no, they should look bad. Shut the fuck up and get back to work, and leave me alone.

Your coworkers are giving their customer the product they pay for. You are over-delivering to no benefit for yourself. I'm not sure you have accurately identified the stupid people in this equation.
posted by phearlez at 9:29 AM on November 18, 2013 [5 favorites]

This May Be As Good As It Gets

Normally I hate to be such a debbie downer, but I have suspected this for some time (and I'm not even an economist!). The only way we seem to be able to have full employment is to have a bubble of some kind.

I really, truly think our best bet is to have a guaranteed minimum income. If there are not enough jobs, period, then pay people just to exist and let them have some dignity. And if people have some kind of income - however low - they'll want to purchase things, which just might kickstart the economy for good.

What we're doing now - basically throwing both the middle aged (over 50) and the young (under 25) like garbage - is inhumane and a waste of talent and life. Not that the 1% care.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 9:30 AM on November 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

Not even just the 1%. There are plenty of people in America for whom your proposal would be "morally wrong".
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 10:01 AM on November 18, 2013

Hell, I'm a socialist and am not sure it's wise to have a guaranteed minimum income.

I'm sure it's just cold war brainwashing, but how would people be motivated to do anything if some kind of "dole" was an option?

Pragmatically, even if I'm for it in an idealistic sense, how could you sell it to anyone but a tiny fringe of the radical left?
posted by Sara C. at 10:05 AM on November 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

This May Be As Good As It Gets

I love how the top comment gets right to the heart of the matter: "The answer to this economic riddle is not that complicated - the wealth of the nation is being extracted from the populace and privately consolidated at the top." How the hell are people supposed to spend if they don't have any money? Maybe Krugman should go back to school and study feudal economics, because that sort of society is where we're headed.

how would people be motivated to do anything if some kind of "dole" was an option?

By a.) enjoyment or b.) reward? It's not like people are going to live high off the hog on whatever the basic income ends up being. They will either love what they are doing so much that they don't care about supplementing their income or they will seek out work to raise their standard of living rather than just to survive day to day. This would force employers to offer real wages because they would no longer have a captive serfdom.

Which is why it will never happen *pessimist*

Many of the bullshit jobs people are forced to do now don't actually need to be done.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 10:14 AM on November 18, 2013 [4 favorites]

> how would people be motivated to do anything if some kind of "dole" was an option?

Most people want to thrive and succeed. If there really aren't enough jobs to go around, having a job would be a status symbol.

Heck, if there really aren't enough jobs to go around, exactly what else are we supposed to do with the "excess" workers?

And there aren't going to be enough jobs - and it's only getting worse. Working in Amazon's warehouses? Going away - soon, three to five years perhaps. Fast food service jobs? Going away - though probably not for a decade - but the only reason it's going to take so long is that it's a bit trickier than filling boxes for deliveries, and fast food workers get paid almost nothing. Jobs that involve driving? Truck driver jobs are safe for now - but in a decade or two they'll be gone. Taxi driver and chauffeur jobs on the other hand might be starting to go in five years.

If they don't give people a guaranteed minimum wage - which we could easily afford to do - then who exactly is going to buy all this stuff that our machines churn out?
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:19 AM on November 18, 2013 [3 favorites]

If they don't give people a guaranteed minimum wage - which we could easily afford to do - then who exactly is going to buy all this stuff that our machines churn out?

Other machines.
posted by dirigibleman at 10:25 AM on November 18, 2013

I can only imagine what the history books will look like in a hundred years after the 1% have used their drone force to wipe out the useless rest of the population to live free of all "encumbrance".

Maybe they won't have history books.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 10:27 AM on November 18, 2013

Steely-eyed Missile Man: This comic comes to mind.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 11:05 AM on November 18, 2013

At least some employers are trying to do the right thing.

Ohio Walmart Criticized For Holding Food Drive For Own Employees
posted by Cookiebastard at 11:06 AM on November 18, 2013

This comic comes to mind.

Heh, yeah, although presumably the elimination of the rest of us is preceded by a functioning robot economy. We'll see, I guess.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 11:12 AM on November 18, 2013

At least some employers are trying to do the right thing.

Is this sarcasm, or did you not read the article? Walmart made something like $16 billion in profit last year, yet they supposedly can't afford to pay their employees living wages, let alone decent health care or really any sort of meaningful employment benefits.
posted by zombieflanders at 11:24 AM on November 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Yes, zombieflanders, I read the article, and I neglected to include a delicious HAMBURGER for the food-drive.
posted by Cookiebastard at 11:49 AM on November 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

I'm sure it's just cold war brainwashing, but how would people be motivated to do anything if some kind of "dole" was an option?

Pragmatically, even if I'm for it in an idealistic sense, how could you sell it to anyone but a tiny fringe of the radical left?

The basic income and minimum income stuff keeps economic incentive to work. If you're content to live a 25k lifestyle, maybe that's your basic income, but if you want a 50k lifestyle, you'll still need to work, and if you want to become a rich hotshot, you can still try for that. There's also all sorts of luxury, Veblen, positional goods economists have described, and things that have inherent scarcity like concert tickets. The dole might pay for Flyover and the supermarket, but not for San Francisco and high cuisine.

I expect and have seen a bit of already that some of the radical left will vehemently oppose this sort of thing - too reformist / neoliberal / doesn't smash capitalism and the State, and some people seem invested enough in The Workers that they want to make sure people keep Working.

I don't think overall it's such a hard sell, especially if it becomes apparent that the basic income will be more cost effective than paying to put down riots.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 12:26 PM on November 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

I don't think overall it's such a hard sell, especially if it becomes apparent that the basic income will be more cost effective than paying to put down riots.

I am not at all sanguine about that. Personally I think the only way things are going to get better is if basically every good/service gets produced by a wholly worker-owned business.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 12:32 PM on November 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

FWIW guys I can see some reasons why a minimum income could be a good thing. In an ideal world, yeah, it would free people up to do things they really love. And lots of people would want more and work harder to get more/satisfy their ambition/be a bigshot.

And, hell, right now what we actually have IRL is people doing soul-sucking unnecessary service industry jobs for a pittance and spending all their free time getting blitzed and watching bad TV anyway, so who's to care whether there is a soul-sucking pointless job involved in the first place. It's not like everyone currently working for $9/hour at Target is going home and composing symphonies in their spare time, thanks to the motivating influence of wage slavery.

I just think it's one of those things you're going to have a hard time selling to anyone to the right of Trotsky.
posted by Sara C. at 12:41 PM on November 18, 2013

Pretty much everyone (except the investor class, shocking) can see what we have to lose by staying our current course. No one has ever been able to articulate to me what we stand to lose by trying the basic income, beyond a vague disquiet that someone might get something for nothing, OMG!

Not attacking you, by the way, Sara C. It's just...I am starting to understand the frustration women have with "feminism 101".
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 12:55 PM on November 18, 2013

> I just think it's one of those things you're going to have a hard time selling to anyone to the right of Trotsky.

We await any sort of alternate suggestion from you - anything at all.

Are you claiming that the jobs will come back... somehow? But how?

If not, what is to be done with the tens of millions of Americans who, through no fault of their own, will never work again?

If we want to avoid unbelievable hardship for millions, is there any sort of path that doesn't involve something "socialist", something that ignorant people might associate with the worst excesses of Russian communism?
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 1:02 PM on November 18, 2013

No one has ever been able to articulate to me what we stand to lose by trying the basic income, beyond a vague disquiet that someone might get something for nothing, OMG!

I'm not sure "vague disquiet" accurately describes the cultural reaction. It's not how I would describe the outcry whenever such things come up, even things that people should rationally see as in their best interest. Steinbeck was right, and those people vote. The fact that they cannot articulate a rational basis for their feelings doesn't matter.
posted by phearlez at 1:09 PM on November 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Again, just to clarify IM A SOCIALIST and I'm potentially in favor of a minimum income.

I just don't think it's in any way realistic as an actual plan that the US would ever adopt.

I mean, I'm sort of on the fence about it/can see pros and cons, and IM A SOCIALIST.

Which, I mean, the vast vast VAST majority of Americans are not socialists. To the point that it's a dirty word. To the point that it's a dirty word on the left.

It seems weird for people to be arguing about this as if the vast majority of the US would be in favor of such a plan and I'm a one percenter for questioning it.

I agree, by the way, that capitalism is horrible and wrong, and that we most likely need radical change away from capitalism and towards a socialist model. A big part of the problem with all these questions, in my mind, is how you get there without a lot of bloodshed and instability, and even if you do get there, how do you prevent the USSR?

I just... don't think anyone in the US is going to actually float a Minimum Income bill anytime even vaguely soon. Like, not even Dennis Kucinich or any of the other wacky leftist usual suspects. Because even the "wacky leftists" in the US government hate socialism.
posted by Sara C. at 1:13 PM on November 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

Sara C., idk about socialist being a dirty word. 1) polling data shows younger people have much more favorable impressions of socialism. 2) Kshama Sawant a self-declared socialist, just got elected to the Seattle city council.
posted by wuwei at 1:22 PM on November 18, 2013

I agree the basic income will most likely not happen, Sara C. Note my comment above about worker-owned businesses. Of course, that requires people of principle to start such businesses rather than the usual "gimme EVERYTHING" suspects I have encountered far too frequently.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 1:23 PM on November 18, 2013

OK so in fifty years, when millennials are the political establishment, maybe we will get reformist legistlation that goes in a socialist-leaning direction. (As a federally guaranteed minimum income would be.)

But right now, in my red state hometown, local political officials are trying to defund the library system because "socialism", in order to build a for-profit prison. The reason they're crying socialism is that people use computers at the library to sign up for food stamps. It looks like they won't win, and most people think they're complete lunatics, but that's about where the overton window is in the US right now on this stuff.
posted by Sara C. at 1:27 PM on November 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

OK so in fifty years, when millennials are the political establishment, maybe we will get reformist legistlation that goes in a socialist-leaning direction. (As a federally guaranteed minimum income would be.)

And that's a big maybe. I see plenty of Facebook posts from people I went to high school with complaining about the many welfare families their taxes feed. And I went to high school in eastern Massachusetts.

Of course, "welfare" gets used pretty euphemistically in eastern Mass., but the point stands: It ain't the attitude of a reformer.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 1:31 PM on November 18, 2013

A guaranteed minimum income has some elements that appeal to both the left and the right, but I'm afraid that the high level of taxation required to support it would be a non-starter with today's GOP. Even if we abolished other safety net programs to help pay for it, we're talking about raising an additional $1.2 trillion a year in revenue, representing 7.5% of our GDP, just to get people above the federal poverty line.

That Slate link suggests that killing all of our current cash assistance programs would only get us to about $6,000 per person in need, which is clearly not a living income. It seems like to get to the point where you can fund a minimum income that someone can live on, you first need higher taxation and a larger safety net budget than we have. Countries that already have higher levels of social spending than we do might be able to pull this off, but I don't see how we get there from here in an era when we can barely fund our existing government programs without a government shutdown or debt ceiling fight every few months.
posted by tonycpsu at 2:42 PM on November 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

> I just don't think it's in any way realistic as an actual plan that the US would ever adopt.

Yes, you said. So what, exactly, ARE the United States going to do?

If you're claiming, "They're going to do nothing and there will be a permanent underclass of about a hundred million unemployable Americans who will live in grinding poverty forever and die young of preventable conditions," then that's certainly a coherent stance. It might even be true - and it isn't much different from contemporary, post-Reagan America except in degree.

I prefer to think that before America becomes, essentially, a third world country that people might possibly consider making some actual changes. Even if I did believe that America was doomed to this due to the aggressive ignorance of the populace, I would certainly never take it for granted, and always talk as if change were actually possible - because once the left is entirely convinced that change is impossible then we literally have lost all hope.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 2:48 PM on November 18, 2013

Dispatches from the world of those "lucky" enough to at least a have shitty job:

Leaders of the New Gilded Age

A Cleveland Wal-Mart store is holding a food drive — for its own employees.

“Please donate food items so associates in need can enjoy Thanksgiving dinner,” reads a sign accompanied by several plastic bins.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer first reported on the food drive, which has sparked outrage in the area.

“That Wal-Mart would have the audacity to ask low-wage workers to donate food to other low-wage workers — to me, it is a moral outrage,” Norma Mills, a customer at the store, told the Plain Dealer.

A company spokesman defended the food drive, telling the Plain Dealer that it is evidence that employees care about each other.

posted by tonycpsu at 3:26 PM on November 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

"A company spokesman defended the food drive, telling the Plain Dealer that it is evidence that employees care about each other."

... and that their employer couldn't care less.
posted by JackFlash at 3:43 PM on November 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

You are over-delivering to no benefit for yourself.

good work is not just something you do for your employer - it's something you do for yourself
posted by pyramid termite at 5:01 PM on November 18, 2013

So what, exactly, ARE the United States going to do?

Again, I don't really know why I'm being interrogated on this subject?

Options as I see them:

- Do nothing, shit gets worse, slide back to a Robber Baron pre-Triangle Shirtwaist level despite the fact that this will mean downscaling our economy and the complexity of our society in order to go back there. End of American Empire, boo fucking hoo.

- The political pendulum eventually swings the other way and we end up with a violent socialist uprising resulting in, at best, the workers seizing the means of production.

- The millennial generation really is less stupid about this stuff due to coming of age in the Great Recession. They form a new Greatest Generation that brings about sweeping economic change on the order of the New Deal and the Great Society, circa 2040.
posted by Sara C. at 5:25 PM on November 18, 2013

good work is not just something you do for your employer - it's something you do for yourself

Yeah, and you'll continue doing it for yourself while your opportunistic boss and co-workers take all the credit.

The only quote that makes sense these days is from a fictional insane clown (The Joker):

"If you're good at something never do it for free."
posted by FJT at 5:37 PM on November 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

He also said something else that makes even more sense today:

Never rub another man's rhubarb.

posted by XMLicious at 5:45 PM on November 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

good work is not just something you do for your employer - it's something you do for yourself

Yeah, and you'll continue doing it for yourself while your opportunistic boss and co-workers take all the credit.

I assure you that the lazy stupid coworkers aren't giving their employers what they pay for. In fact, the lazy stupid coworker I had in mind when I wrote those comments, was recently fired for not doing any work at all. He spent all his time "networking" with other employees, and by that, I mean interrupting them while they were working and nagging them about how he could get on the Math team when it resumes work in January. He was on the Science team, but they obviously wanted to get rid of him so they pushed him out, and towards us. He's not going to make it. The Math team is notorious for having the hardest job in the entire company, the Science team is a close second. You have find your own satisfaction within the work, and work hard. This guy hardly worked. On the few moments he actually sat at his desk and did data entry, he actually moaned and groaned, constantly sighing loudly, in theatrical expressions of his disgust with this simple data entry work. I watched him fall apart before my eyes. Sometime during his first week, I noticed he stopped shaving. Sometime in the middle of week 2, I noticed he stopped bathing. Soon he stopped wearing clean clothing. One day he showed up at work with some sort of grey dirt smeared all over him, like he was rolling around in dirt. He started begging me to slow down because my hard work was making him look bad. But he was doing that all by himself. The writing was on the wall.

But he was by far, not the worst co-worker I have encountered. Some of them were low functioning, like the guy who drank a bottle of cough syrup every morning (he offered me one, I declined). Some of them were high functioning, like the former high school math teacher who could do her job, but didn't, because she was too busy running a bookie operation via text messaging, in coordination with her ex-husband in Vegas.

While I may be working far harder than those morons, I assure you that I'm not over-delivering. Some of the full timers are loaned to my task, we work about equally hard and are about equally productive. They aren't making much more than I am, but they have job security and benefits. I work hard to demonstrate I can be a full time employee. When they need one, they won't be picking the lazy stupid ones.

Yes, the entire point is to have my opportunistic boss take the credit. The traditional model is that you make his whole department look good, then he gets promoted, and everyone moves up a notch. Eventually you take his place. You can do this without anyone really knowing who is doing all the work, as long as the boss clearly understands you helped him advance, and you could stop. Your annoying coworkers also get some of the credit, they are riding your shirttails. They probably aren't aware you could stop covering their ass, and it never occurred to them that you might be their boss someday. Someday soon.
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:43 PM on November 18, 2013 [3 favorites]

The traditional model is that you make his whole department look good, then he gets promoted, and everyone moves up a notch.

Yeah that kind of assumes that your boss and company understands things like loyalty and quid pro quo. And assumes that your boss is competent enough to get promoted. Both assumptions which blew up in my face this year...
posted by FJT at 6:56 PM on November 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

With temp jobs, in my experience it's best not to work too quickly. I think it's good to work diligently and thoroughly, but when I was a temp, for the most part I was hired to do a task. And when the task was done, the job was over. So it was understood that everyone would work as slowly as was reasonable to stretch the job as long as possible.

Even now that I'm not a temp, I've been in plenty of situations where it was understood that working too hard was not a great thing and it would be better to keep your head down for various reasons. Mainly related to being a team player, not showing others up, etc. It seems like a perfectly OK thing to me -- I don't really see the point of trying to be some kind of heroic stakhanovite. Then again maybe I would feel differently about this if my work history didn't consist of 50+ hour work weeks punctuated by periodic hiatuses. They don't hand out gold stars for finishing all your work by 4:30. They just hand you another pile of work.

This, of course, is a VERY different thing from not doing any work at all to the point of getting fired. Or worse, not doing any work at all, having massive delusions about your potential with the company, AND also getting fired.
posted by Sara C. at 7:04 PM on November 18, 2013 [1 favorite]

Sara C.: "I'm sure it's just cold war brainwashing, but how would people be motivated to do anything if some kind of "dole" was an option?"

Besides all the people motivated to live better than the bare minimum that been extensively covered many people just plain like to work. Which is why so many people volunteer their time.
posted by Mitheral at 8:17 PM on November 18, 2013

The absurd kicker with all this corporate culture of wage-slashing, resume-filtering, high-standards bullshit is that it's just done because it's easy, it's a buyer's market, but what do they do with all the people they hire who fit the "must have X years in ___, no gaps in resume, degree in ___" criteria? Let all the ideas and ambition they bring to the table get tossed aside in dumb decision after dumb decision daily because if you're not in an explicitly creative field (well, and often, even if you are) nobody wants to listen to new ideas from anyone below management level (except the managers who want to present them as their ideas).

The one that killed my ambition to go out of my way for the company was the one that I could have accomplished by myself in six months with no extra company resources that would have saved them more than my entire salary every year, but there was a handshake deal between my boss' boss' boss and the guy who was shafting us with how much he was charging for a product that anybody with even my middling programming skills could replicate, because it's been done a million times over and the only difference was a tiny bit of tacked-on industry-specific stuff that's cake to implement. So nowadays my ideas just go in my "things to do when I can support myself for a year to get them off the ground" file, because I tried the company loyalty line and pitched great ideas from within and found that what they mean by "loyalty" begins and ends with "you come here, sit at your desk, don't complain, and keep your ambition in check".

Well and also, my entire industry being rapidly bought up by companies trying to do what Clear Channel did to radio makes me want to just run screaming from the whole thing. That'll put a bit of a damper on the ambition, knowing the fruits of your labor go to feed that kind of beast. When toeing the company line to get ahead also means implicitly toeing a certain political line, it's heartbreaking to see how many people who are down in the trenches with you will throw their beliefs away for a million-to-one shot at it.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:43 PM on November 18, 2013 [2 favorites]

good work is not just something you do for your employer - it's something you do for yourself

Congratulations, you have truly internalized the slave mentality. It's something you do for yourself if you are working for yourself. If you're doing it for the benefit of someone who doesn't give a shit about you, you are a chump.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:12 PM on November 18, 2013 [11 favorites]

I do not have the stability to wait until 2040 for this problem to be solved. A solution in my 60s does me no good for making it that long on my current, nonexistent income stability.
posted by Archelaus at 10:03 PM on November 18, 2013

Collectively we can't wait. If the political system is no longer flexible enough to implement the necessary reforms, where does that leave us?
posted by wuwei at 10:04 PM on November 18, 2013

Congratulations, you have truly internalized the slave mentality.

anyone who's learned anything about the institution of slavery knows that slaves were infamous for their avoidance of work, competency and anything else their owner wanted from them - and who can blame them?

even the greeks and romans knew about this
posted by pyramid termite at 2:10 AM on November 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

By "slave mentality" I mean, "the mentality that makes you a slave," not, "the mentality of those who were slaves".
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 4:57 AM on November 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

CJR: Three stories, three tacks on a Walmart’s employee food drive
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:12 PM on November 20, 2013 [1 favorite]

A huge cardboard bin sitting on a pallet recently appeared in the lobby of my workplace. It has a colorful 4 foot wide inkjet poster on the front announcing the company's United Way Thanksgiving food drive. The moment I saw that poster, I was infuriated. The company where I used to work that did inkjet printing, today they would charge about $200 for that poster. My last fine art job was working with a local photographer that sold similar size inkjet prints for $3k to $5k. Those jobs were a long time ago. Seeing this damn poster, seeing what it asked me to do, was like a kick in the stomach.

I don't normally go through the lobby, I come to work through the servant's entrance. So this box could have been there for several days. I approached it to peer into the box, it was over four feet tall. Obviously they have high hopes. There was nothing in the box.

In the lunch room yesterday, as I sat eating my 90 cent ramen bowl and 69 cent yogurt (slightly exceeding my $1.50 daily lunch budget), I watched the corporate announcements on the newly installed 50 inch High Def flat screen TV. One Powerpoint slide congratulated the members of the United Way team for achieving their goals. As a reward for cajoling money out of other employees, the team has been awarded a half-day off, with pay. They can go home at noon on the day before Thanksgiving. Congratulations, and fuck you little people. The United Way team is mostly executives and managers who have full time salaried positions. They already took paid time at work to go around cadging money off their coworkers. They could skip a half day of work any time and get paid the same. If I did that, I'd lose wages roughly equivalent to my lunch budget for two months.

I already lost an hour and a half of wages that morning, I had a doctor's appointment (yay free medicare). When I got to work at ten, the manager assembled the entire team, and ranted for 10 minutes about people not getting to work on time, not returning from breaks on time, and taking time off for frivolous things like doctor's appointments. He said he could make it a condition of employment that you show up for all scheduled work hours, and if you don't, there are a dozen people lined up and ready to take your job. But I worked 48 hours last week, I signed up for every available work hour, and he cancelled my Saturday and Sunday overtime at 4:30PM on Friday.

After lunch, I groused about the food drive to a coworker, who I know goes to the local Food Bank occasionally, just as I do. We are recipients of charity, rather than donors. We talked about signing up for the Food Bank's free turkey dinner. The Food Bank is usually open weekdays from noon to five, so we can't ever go there during our working hours. But they are open one evening a week, Tuesday night. Our only chance is to go next week, two days before Thanksgiving. But that's probably too late to get a chance at the Thanksgiving meal program. I suppose there are people more deserving of Thanksgiving charity than the working poor, like us.

Today as we went on our morning break, other employees were leaving the break room. A friend of mine shouted out, "hurry, there are some free donuts left!" When I got there, the box was empty. There was a 24x36 inch inkjet poster next to the empty box, announcing the free donuts were a reward for some onsite program I never heard of. It would have been nice to announce the reward before it was gone. But I suppose I wasn't entitled to it.
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:38 PM on November 20, 2013 [7 favorites]

charlie don't surf, you have a lot of writing ability, but please remember, Dickens already covered that territory. Couldn't you please write something more sunny, like about the satisfaction from work well done and the work ethic and how our society is steadily moving toward a bright future... oh fuck it, I got nothin'.
posted by VikingSword at 8:31 PM on November 20, 2013

VikingSword, I believe what you are saying, what I am saying, even what FauxScot and many others are saying is the same thing, but for different reasons.
posted by charlie don't surf at 11:02 PM on November 20, 2013

This thread (and life?) in a NSFW nutshell.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 6:20 AM on November 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

charlie don't surf: " As a reward for cajoling money out of other employees, the team has been awarded a half-day off, with pay. They can go home at noon on the day before Thanksgiving. Congratulations, and fuck you little people. The United Way team is mostly executives and managers who have full time salaried positions. They already took paid time at work to go around cadging money off their coworkers. They could skip a half day of work any time and get paid the same."

So their reward for advancing the companies marketing goals was nothing but their regular pay. And it's a double knife twist because they were probably either planning to knock off early that day or they are so busy stock piling completed work before the holiday they can't take the time off.
posted by Mitheral at 6:50 AM on November 21, 2013

So their reward for advancing the companies marketing goals was nothing but their regular pay.

Well, it wasn't really a company goal, it was United Way's goal. They're not really promoting the company, except to pat themselves on the back for their alleged generosity.

My general opinion of Thanksgiving charity can be found in the O Henry story "Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen."

Part 1

Part 2
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:26 PM on November 21, 2013