Jobs? What jobs?

…continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work. I’m sure most of them would like work, and probably have tried to seek it, but you can’t argue that it’s a job enhancer. If anything, it’s a disincentive. And the same thing with the COBRA extension and the other extensions here… Senator Jon “Why Should I Pay for Women to have Maternity Leave” Kyl arguing against extending unemployment benefits and COBRA.

It’s not that he thinks unemployed people aren’t trying to find work! It's that…well...they aren’t trying as hard as they would be if the ante weren’t upped a bit by cutting off all benefits.

See, that’s why we have high unemployment. There’s been this sudden, inexplicable epidemic of laziness among unemployed Americans, who just aren’t bothering.

Maybe an outbreak of homelessness, untreated illness and malnutrition will snap them out of it.

“We are always looking for the very best of the industry, which happens to be people who are still employed.” restaurant owner Bobby Fitzgerald

You know all that stuff about how if we support the free market, jobs will result? Well, forget that. According to this piece in The Wall Street Journal online, many employers don’t want to hire someone who’s currently unemployed:

Charlie Wilgus, managing partner of executive search for Lucas Group, based in Atlanta, says a manufacturing client looking for a division president recently refused to consider a former divisional president at Newell Rubbermaid Inc. whose department had been eliminated. The client doesn’t want candidates who have been laid off, Mr. Wilgus says.

But never fear, says the WSJ! If, for some unaccountable reason, you find yourself unemployed in the current economy, a sufficient amount of groveling, (“calm an employer’s biggest worry about out-of-work applicants: that your termination was the result of poor performance”) “strong records of recommendation” and, being “flexible on your salary or title,” just might get you a job.

Not the same job, and with a lower salary of course, but hey, what else do you think you deserve, you jobless bum?

Money woes could signal disorder in an individual's personal life that could translate into slipshod work habits, some staffing experts said. Companies lose billions annually to employee theft. A sterling credit history, they said, points to a worker who is more likely to be disciplined, trustworthy and reliable. LA Times, 6/7/09

See, if you’re poor and in debt, you are probably a potential crook with a lousy work ethic. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the economy tanking and unemployment going through the roof.

That seems to be the rationale behind the trend described in this LA Times article about people not being hired because they have bad credit ratings.

Yes, it’s nice to know that in this time of high unemployment, some employers are adopting the approach to healthcare used by healthcare insurers – the more badly you need it, the more difficult it should be to get it.

Check out this animated map, with the red spots indicating job loss.

It gets pretty bloody in 2008.

Cindy Goodman was having dinner with a group of girlfriends one night when the conversation took a surprising turn.

Goodman asked her friends where they planned to go this year for their summer vacation. Nowhere, they answered. They were afraid to take time off because they didn't want to risk losing their jobs, she says.

"It's going to be an interesting summer," says Goodman, a Miami Herald business columnist…

Numerous articles and studies draw the same conclusions: Americans don't know how to pry themselves away from the workplace. CNN 5/14/2009

It’s usually a bad sign when an article begins, as this one does, with a talk taking “a surprising turn” when someone’s ”having dinner with a group of girlfriends.” The girlfriends at dinners attended by business columnists are rarely women working in low paying jobs in retail or the service industry, and so the “surprising turn” is almost always something that’s not the slightest bit “surprising” to women who do. Some aspect of the tide that’s already engulfed working class Americans is now swirling around the knees of those with the time and leisure to go out for dinner with the gals, and they’re looking down at it with astonishment and dismay.

I call it "happy-face news" – a news story that puts a plastic, happy face on what is actually a bad situation. Such pieces can be fascinating, not because of what they deliberately impart, but because of what’s glimpsed through the cracks.

The shiny varnish spread over this piece is the fiction that many Americans eschew vacations because well, we’re all such busy, industrious beavers who just “don’t know how to pry themselves away from the workplace.” The observation about people being worried about losing their jobs is an early hairline fracture, but it’s quickly brushed over by the tenor of the column, which treats such worries as if they were irrational.

Taking this CNN piece at face value, you’d never guess that, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “almost one in four Americans have no paid vacation and no paid holidays.”

Hell, forget about paid vacations -- a significant portion of American workers don’t even get paid sick days.

The cracks in this perky façade widen as the article gets around to indirectly admitting that getting any vacation time in America, paid or not, often involves prayerfully beseeching one’s boss to grant it. And frequently what you end up with is not an actual vacation, but some miserable crumb of a substitute. Take, for instance, the section of the article where Christine Louise Hohlbaum (Author of The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7 World) describes how a computer technician “coped”:

He started a walking group for his colleagues during lunch hour.

He and his colleagues were transformed.

"It was an amazing experience," Hohlbaum says. "They bonded. It helped people relax and when they got back to work, they were much more productive."

So the solution offered to “exhausted employees” is not for those employees to, (God Forbid!) organize and demand more vacation time so they can actually have a life outside of the workplace. No, the solution offered is for employees to spend their lunch hours going for walks with their fellow employees.

In short, what was formerly simply free time becomes structured “free time.”

Hey, fellow cubicle dweller, forget eating that apple in the park and reading that novel during your precious, all-too-short lunch. No, you’re going to spend that forty-five minutes walking around with the people with whom you just spent three hours, and with whom you are going to spend an additional four hours after your lunch “break.”

Honest, it’ll be amazing! Transforming! We’ll bond!

If there was extra time allotted for these walks, the article does not mention it, though Hohlbaum does urge “other workers to follow his example” by explaining to the boss how much more productive “well-rested workers” are likely to be.

Which, of course, misses the point of a vacation entirely.

The point of free time should not be making someone a “better worker.” The point of free time should be making the life of the worker and his or her family better.

The tough job market is prompting a growing number of women across the country to dance in strip clubs, appear in adult movies or pose for magazines like Hustler.

Employers across the adult entertainment industry say they're seeing an influx of applications from women who....are attracted by the promise of flexible schedules and fast cash. Many have college degrees and held white-collar jobs until the economy soured.

"You're seeing a lot more beautiful women who are eligible to do so many other things," said Gus Poulos, general manager of New York City's Sin City gentleman's club. Chicago (AP) 3/23/09

It’s not that I consider the Adult Entertainment field an evil, evil thing that needs to be legislated out of existence. And I’m sure there are women who have worked in strip clubs, adult films, or skin magazines and found it personally rewarding.

But stripping in a club is not quite the same as waiting tables for a while to make ends meet. It may pay more, but it also brings with it a tremendous amount of baggage not present in most retail or food service jobs. “Some performers said they were initially so nervous that only alcohol could calm their nerves,” observes the article, and “Eva Stone, a 25-year-old dancer at the Pink Monkey, said dealing with occasional verbal abuse from patrons requires 'a thick skin.'"

Somehow I doubt that “verbal abuse” is quite on the same level as a customer making rude cracks to a waitress about his long wait for his entrée.

It’s interesting to note that some of the most sensible and serious comments in this story come from veterans in the field of adult entertainment. It’s Steven Hirsch, head of Vivid Entertainment group who points out, "Once you decide to be an adult actress, it impacts your relationship with everyone. Once you make an adult film, it never goes away."

And who would have thought that the general manager of a “gentleman’s club” called “Sin City” would cut right down to the nub of this story, the tragedy of it – who would look at a woman who’s resorted to dancing naked in public and observe that she could “do so many other things?”

"People don't like old people, it's as simple as that," said Janice Goodman, a New York City labor lawyer who specializes in discrimination cases. "They are too comfortable and they don't know new things." ABC News 3/10/09

ABC is covering something that’s actually been going on for a while now – the discarding of older, higher paid employees who are replaced with young people. The usual rationale offered is that younger employees have more up to date knowledge about the latest technical innovations. Or, as Allison Hemming, founder of “The Hired Guns” puts it in a quote so laden with jargon I imagine her using flash cards:

"We're not really seeing as much of an age bias as a skill-set bias…We are seeing a lot of 'talent upgrades' happening, meaning our clients are being strategic and are replacing underperformers with A-players.

There is a lot of fresh talent that is suddenly available because of wholesale layoffs happening at companies in almost every industry across the board. Many are taking a defensive posture and freeing up cash by downsizing and then 'storing their acorns' in case the recession takes longer to turn around…Someone who has had a job in a print production role at an ad agency for 20 years may find themselves replaced by a younger worker who has top digital chops. So in this case, it's not about the older worker's age, it's about demand for the type of work to keep said agency in business and producing the type of work its clients now need."

This is a form of what we called “Geeksploitation” back in the '90s, and it has nothing to do with over-fifty employees being “underperformers” who need to be replaced with “A-players.”

It has everything to do with older workers being savvy enough and serious enough to demand higher salaries and benefits. These workers get laid off and replaced with naïve kids who frequently can’t imagine why they would need silly ol’ things like comprehensive health benefits or pension plans.

The youngsters are then worked into burnout and discarded after a couple of years.

The regulations, scheduled to take effect April 1, would deny shelter to families who in the last three years had been evicted from or had abandoned public or subsidized housing without good cause, and to those who fail to meet a new 30-hour per week work requirement and save 30 percent of their income. The Boston Globe, 2/17/09

So at a time when foreclosures and unemployment are skyrocketing, and more and more families are finding themselves homeless, the State of Massachusetts has decided to impose more stringent rules on who gets to avail themselves of its shelters. In addition to denying shelter to people have been unable to find 30 hours of work a week or save 30 percent of their income, they will also:

reduce from six months to three months the period families can remain in shelters after their incomes rise above state limits; force out families absent from shelters for at least two consecutive nights as well as those who reject one offer of housing without good reason; and deny benefits for families whose members have outstanding default or arrest warrants as well as those whose only child is between ages 18 and 21, unless the child has a disability or is in high school.

These regulations put so much of the onus on the homeless that they are guaranteed to result in scores of struggling families out on the streets. In the current economy it’s easy to imagine a skilled, employable person being unable to find 30 hours of work every week, and given that most homeless families are coping with mountainous debt, how are they expected to save 30% of their income (such as it is?) As one struggling single mother quoted in the article points out, three months is not much time for a family, even one whose income rises “above state limits” to find affordable housing.

Then there’s the whole question of what is a “good cause” for abandoning public or subsidized housing, or a “good reason” for rejecting an offer of housing. Who gets to decide this for the homeless family involved? Who is given the privilege of second-guessing such decisions?

“It is certainly not our intent to be punitive,” says Julia E. Kehoe, the commissioner of the Department of Transitional Assistance,

and we understand the difficulties families are facing, but we are responsible for transforming the system, and particularly at a challenging time, it is absolutely critical that all stake holders need to work together to make sure that families have the greatest chance of moving out of shelter and poverty.”

By reducing those eligible for shelter, Kehoe said the new regulations would save the state $520,000 this fiscal year and more than $11 million in fiscal 2010. "Given our limited resources, we wanted to encourage people to find housing or stay where they are, rather than encouraging them to come into the system," she said.

Right. They’re not being punitive! Why, they’re just trying to “encourage people to find housing or stay where they are rather than encouraging them to come into the system.” Obviously, Massachusetts has been hit with an inexplicable epidemic of families who frivolously abandon their housing and “come into the system” because it’s such an “encouraging” and fun experience to live in state shelters.

No doubt the next time a Bostonian catches a disturbing glimpse of some homeless family trying to shelter themselves in a doorway, the thought of all the money that’s being saved will be a profound comfort.

“…a vehicle for people who want to expand their life experience by working somewhere else. A lot of people want to work in India.” IBM spokesman on IBM's “Project Match,” a program inviting laid-off IBM workers to apply for IBM jobs at a fraction of their former salary in places like India, China, Brazil, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Russia, South Africa, Nigeria or the United Arab Emirates. Quoted in Rawstory 2/3/09

According to Informationweek, about 4,000 IBM employees have been laid off since the beginning of the year. There’s no question that somewhere in that 4,000 there are people who would like to work – temporarily – in another country in order to “expand their life experience” and are willing to do it for a pittance. Most of these eager travelers are probably in their twenties, unmarried, unencumbered by any serious health issues and not yet grappling with the prospect of retirement or aging parents in need of care.

To present the prospect of becoming expatriate workers to laid-off employees as if it were a fun “opportunity” rather than a profoundly unpleasant last resort is to put a happy-face on the death of the American dream. There’s nothing new about this, of course. Corporations have been engaging in this patronizing nonsense for over two decades now. But given the current economy, it’s even more of an insult than it used to be.

“They know where they work. If they can’t deal with it then there are plenty of other jobs out there." Luke Benjamin, the owner of Pizza Time in Lacey, Washington, on his refusal to heat his shop. King 5 News

One of the first images Dickens uses to define Scrooge as an inhumane jerk is Scrooge’s refusal to allow his shivering clerk, Bob Cratchit to put more coal on the fire. Luke Benjamin in Washington has apparently decided, wittingly or unwittingly, to take the famous miser as a role model. After his employees forgot to turn the furnace off one night after work, he turned off the heat completely in his pizza delivery shop in Lacey Washington, where, according to employee Dan Baxter, “When it’s really, really cold, like when it’s 19 (degrees) outside, it will be 25 in the store.”

The comment from Benjamin that “there are plenty of other jobs out there” is especially telling. Surely, as a small business owner, he’s aware of the current state of the economy. Surely he’s aware that, in fact, there are not “plenty of other jobs out there.”

Which I suspect is why he seems confident he can make his employees work in such conditions without worrying about a mass walkout.

This story seems absurd, and on the surface trivial. A pizza shop job is seen by most people as a job for teenagers and college students, something done to supplement an allowance on one’s way to bigger things. But for some workers, even a job like this can be the difference between being able to afford college or having to drop out, between being able to pay one’s rent and being evicted. And as the economy worsens, more employers are going to exploit the uncertainty and high unemployment by abusing their workers and saying, “leave, if you don’t like it.” Otto L.Bettman’s fascinating book, The Good Old Days – They Were Terrible! describes this mindset in a section on working conditions in those “good old days.”

One railroad-yard superintendent refused to roof a loading platform, even though in the cold his men had contracted rheumatism and asthma. His observation: “Men are cheaper than shingles…There’s a dozen waiting when one drops out.”

The truly painful kicker in this story is the following exchange between the reporter and the pizza shop owner, after the reporter asks why there is a space heater in the manager’s office. “That’s my…that’s my wife accounting office. She’s also in accounting, she owns Accurate Accounting…”

Way to go Mr. Benjamin! No doubt Accurate Accounting is delighted with the advertising boost of being named in conjunction with a business that forces its employees to work in temperatures as low as 25 degrees.

Then he adds, “It doesn’t look good, but she’s my wife and she’s my boss. She tells me what she’s going to do. I’m not going to argue with her.”

I’m going to be charitable here, and assume that Mr. Benjamin was caught completely off guard by this reporter and did not in fact mean to imply that his wife is calling all the shots and is behind his decision to cut off the heat in the rest of the shop. That may be the case, but it may also be that his wife, after asking him what the hell he meant by turning off the heat and being unable to get him to see reason, hauled in the space heater so she could pore over her clients’ accounts without contracting pneumonia.

Good luck in the future, Pizza Time – and Accurate Accounting. I’m afraid you’re going to need it.

POSTSCRIPT: The Tribune internal Q&A website on today’s bankruptcy filing states that "all ongoing severance payments have been discontinued.” So if you’re one of the large number of reporters, editors and other staffers at the L.A. Times, the Chicago Trib or other papers who got sacked and didn’t get your severance in one lump sum, you have a real problem. A sit-down strike, such as that currently being waged in that Chicago door and window factory, seems a fitting and proper response, though you’ll need help from those of your former colleagues still employed to get back into the buildings. Washington Post 12/9/08.

The start of a hopeful trend? It looks as thought the case of the angry ex-employees occupying Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago has resonated.

Maybe, just maybe not just reporters and editors, but other desk-bound employees are beginning to understand that they are “workers” too. Maybe, just maybe, the “blame the unions” meme isn’t having the same effect it has in the past, and the merits of organizing are becoming painfully clear to Americans confronting our dysfunctional economy.