J-O-B-S

[prole]

All the "bipartisan" budget talk is cute and all but...

 

Where are they going to come from?

 

Help Wanted — Jobless Need Not Apply

 

In 2008, Michelle, a 53-year-old Illinois resident with 19 years experience in information technology, became another casualty of the Great Recession. More than a year later, after a long and fruitless job search, she finally heard from a headhunter who thought she sounded like a great fit for a post he was looking to fill.

 

But when Michelle told him how long she had been out of work, the headhunter turned apologetic: His client, he said, wouldn't accept people who had been unemployed for more than six months. Michelle would go on to stay jobless for so long that she ultimately exhausted all her unemployment benefits, and, for the first time in her life, was forced to apply for food stamps and welfare.

 

Michelle's tale was recounted at a recent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) meeting devoted to the issue of hiring discrimination against the unemployed. As the commission found, Michelle's experience is far from unique. No one officially tracks how many job openings explicitly bar the unemployed, but several news reports since last summer have uncovered numerous online job postings that require candidates be employed during the application process. One such listing was posted by the cellphone giant Sony Ericsson--a move the company later called a "mistake."

 

Job-placement professionals say that over the last year, more and more employers have made it clear they won't consider job candidates who aren't working. "A lot of our recruiters have had clients who have come across this," Matt Deutsch of TopEchelon.com, which brings recruiters together to collaborate in finding jobs for candidates, told The Lookout, calling the practice "unfortunate."

 

With the number of Americans who have been out of work for six months or longer at a whopping 6.2 million, and with 4.7 unemployed workers for every job opening, advocates for the jobless say this growing form of hiring discrimination creates another hurdle for the increasingly desperate ranks of the unemployed. "At a moment when we all should be doing whatever we can to open up job opportunities to the unemployed, it is profoundly disturbing that the trend of deliberately excluding the jobless from work opportunities is on the rise," Christine Owens, who runs the National Employment Law Center, told the EEOC.

 

Some experts say that discrimination against the jobless, as currently practiced, may violate civil rights laws--a question the commission is now considering. In itself, such discrimination isn't illegal. (New Jersey is exploring legislation that would prohibit job ads telling the unemployed not to apply.) But it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or age. And African-Americans and older workers are disproportionately represented among the long-term unemployed--meaning they may be bearing the brunt of discrimination against the jobless.

 

The EEOC declined to say whether it's investigating specific cases of potential violations.

 

Some employers have said they're unwilling to hire unemployed workers because they believe that if a worker has once been let go, that's a sign that he or she is probably not a great hire. "People who are currently employed … are the kind of people you want as opposed to people who get cut," one recruiter told the Atlanta Journal Constitution in October.

 

And as Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke has said, when people are out of work for a long time, their skills can erode, which may understandably make them less attractive to employers.

 

But Deutsch said that a bias against the jobless is also a time-saving device for companies that may themselves be making do with less, thanks to the downturn. "If you've got a huge stack of submissions, and you want to get through them quickly, [you can say] 'OK, all the people who are not currently employed, forget them,' " Deutsch explained. "That's gonna cut down on your workload."

 

However, aside from the damage that this practice does to unemployed candidates, employers who adopt it may be shooting themselves in the foot, since they're probably screening out qualified applicants who were laid off through no fault of their own. "To think that that's going to bring you all the qualified candidates you want to see is probably not the case," Deutsch said.

[rob]

[prole]

Yes, I imagine most of the electorate is likely to be just as eloquent in addressing the question when they're not being force-fed talking points.

[rob]

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize I had stumbled into the Greek Forum.

 

I'll stop distracting you and let you guys figure out these important questions -- you're obviously doing important work here!

 

I mean, interent forums are where this shit GETS SORTED OUT!!!

[rob]

Internet forums, and also "Weekday" with Steve Scher. His program looks into important issues, and discusses them!

 

 

SPURT SPURT SPURT!!!

Edited February 17, 2011 by rob

[prole]

Internet forums, and also "Weekday" with Steve Scher.

 

[Lucky Larry]

I give up, Eeyore.

 

I'm beginning to consider my options.....hmmm...well....uh...?

 

Just heard 80 million Indians over 65 don't have health care, or family to stay with--too much of a burden, and many don't even have a place to die. That's a lot of dead bodies laying around. Jesus, the numbers, can't even grasp it.

 

The world has shrunk to a pimple and is going to pop.

Edited February 18, 2011 by Lucky Larry

[Jim]

Not quite sure what the point is. Do you want a bill to force employers to consider unemployed people first? Yea - if you have a job it's often easier to get a job - nothing new. Do we need to get the economic engine going - you bet. I'm looking for a good technical staff person right now. Doesn't matter if they are employed or not - I'm taking the best qualified .

[prole]

You're not sure what the point is? The point is there's nothing on the horizon (private sector or otherwise) that's going to provide an engine for economic growth while putting to work large numbers of unemployed, underemployed, new workers entering the workforce, and those boomers who'll need to work for the next 15-20 years. The US, Europe, and Japan have been post-industrial for quite some time now and we've been puffing up our economies with a series of bubbles now since popped. American firms are fleeing this country's people as workers and as consumers to realize profits elsewhere. Our countries don't know what to do with our old people or our now-redundant populations. We're in debt to our eyeballs and the proposed austerity is going to bleed us into some very grim political territory when we're already seeing the balkanization of our social landscapes. Where's the next BIG idea and complex of institutional arrangements that's going to provide the framework for the next capitalist expansion and deliver what the world's people have come to expect from freedom?

[rob]

do you have any solutions?

 

blah blah blah things are bad blah blah blah

 

[Lucky Larry]

Jesus that hurts. However, I would probably feel even worse if I had been someone that bought into it, did everything right, and still ended up being broke. sickie

 

I did end up buying my own set of belief's that got me into the same stinko--can't blame the bankers for that one. Hee Haw.

Edited February 18, 2011 by Lucky Larry

[prole]

do you have any solutions?

 

blah blah blah things are bad blah blah blah

 

If we're in a fairly early phase of what looks like long term structural crisis, it's more important to be asking the right kind of questions.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

do you have any solutions?

 

blah blah blah things are bad blah blah blah

 

If we're in a fairly early phase of what looks like long term structural crisis, it's more important to be asking the right kind of questions.

 

all you do is whine and bitch

[prole]

End of the Recession? Who’s Kidding Whom?

by Immanuel Wallerstein

Jan. 1, 2011

 

The media are telling us that the economic “crisis” is over, and that the world-economy is once more back to its normal mode of growth and profit. On December 30, Le Monde summed up this mood in one of its usual brilliant headlines: “The United States wants to believe in an economic upturn.” Exactly, they “want to believe” it, and not only people in the United States. But is it so?

 

First of all, as I have been saying repeatedly, we are not in a recession but in a depression. Most economists tend to have formal definitions of these terms, based primarily on rising prices in stock markets. They use these criteria to demonstrate growth and profit. And politicians in power are happy to exploit this nonsense. But neither growth nor profit is the appropriate measures.

 

There are always some people who are making profit, even in the worst of times. The question is how many people, and which people? In “good” times, most people are seeing an improvement in their material situation, even if there are considerable differences between those at the top and bottom of the economic ladder. A rising tide raises all ships, as the saying goes, or at least most ships.

 

But when the world-economy becomes stagnant, as the world-economy has been since the 1970s, several things happen. The numbers of people who are not gainfully employed and therefore receiving an income that is minimally adequate goes up considerably. And because this is so, countries try to export unemployment to each other. In addition, politicians tend to try to deprive the elderly retired persons and the young, pre-working-age persons of income in order to appease their voters in the usual working-age categories.

 

That is why, appraising the situation country by country, there are always some in which the situation looks much better than in most others. But which countries look better tends to shift with some rapidity, as it has been doing for the last forty years.

 

Furthermore, as the stagnation continues, the negative picture grows larger, which is when the media begin to talk of “crisis” and politicians look for quick fixes. They call for “austerity,” which means cutting pensions and education and child care even further. They deflate their currencies, if they can, in order that they reduce momentarily their unemployment rates at the expense of some other country’s employment rates.

 

Take the problem of government pensions. A small town in Alabama exhausted its pension fund in 2009. It declared bankruptcy and ceased paying its pensions, thereby violating state law which required it to do so. As the New York Times remarked, “It is not just the pensioners who suffer when a pension fund runs dry. If a city tried to follow the law and pay its pensioners with money from its annual operating budget, it would probably have to adopt large tax increases, or make huge service cuts, to come up with the money. Current city workers could find themselves paying into a pension plan that will not be there for their own retirements.”

 

But this is the looming problem for every state within the United States who, by law, must have balanced budgets, which means they cannot resort to borrowing to meet current budgetary needs. And there is a parallel problem for every nation within the euro zone who cannot deflate their currencies in order to meet their budgetary needs, which has meant that their ability to borrow leads to exorbitant unsustainable costs.

 

But what, you may ask, about those countries where the economy is said to be “booming” such as Germany and most particularly, within Germany, Bavaria – called by some “the planet of the happy.” Why then do Bavarians “feel a malaise” and seem “subdued and uncertain about their economic health”? The New York Times notes that “Germany’s good fortune…is widely viewed (in Bavaria) as having come at the expense of workers, who for the past decade have sacrificed wages and benefits to make their employers more competitive….In fact, part of the prosperity comes from people not getting the social security they should have.”

 

Well then, at least, there is the good example of the “emerging economies” which have been showing sustained growth during the last few years – especially the so-called BRIC countries. Look again. The Chinese government is very concerned about the loose lending practices of Chinese banks, which seem to be a bubble, and leading to the threat of inflation. One result is the sharp increase in layoffs in a country where the safety net for the unemployed seems to have disappeared. Meanwhile, the new president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, is said to be disturbed by the “overvalued” Brazilian currency amidst what she sees as the deflating U.S. and Chinese currencies that, together, are threatening the ability of Brazilian exports to be competitive. And the governments of Russia, India, and South Africa are all facing rumbling discontent from large parts of their populations who seemed to have escaped the benefits of presumed economic growth.

 

Finally, and not least, there are the sharp rises in the prices of energy, food, and water. This is the result of a combination of world population growth and increased percentages of people demanding access. This portends a struggle for these basic goods, a struggle that could turn deadly. There are two possible outcomes. One is that large numbers of people will reduce the level of their demand – most unlikely. The second is that the deadliness of the struggle results in a reduced world population and thereby fewer shortages – a most unpleasant Malthusian solution.

 

As we enter this second decade of the twenty-first century, it seems improbable that by 2020 we shall look back on this decade as one in which the “crisis” was relegated to a historical memory. It is not very helpful to “wish to believe” in a prospect that seems remote. It does not help in trying to figure out what we should do about it.--from here.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

End of the Recession? Who’s Kidding Whom?

by Immanuel Wallerstein

Jan. 1, 2011

 

The media are telling us that the economic “crisis” is over, and that the world-economy is once more back to its normal mode of growth and profit. On December 30, Le Monde summed up this mood in one of its usual brilliant headlines: “The United States wants to believe in an economic upturn.” Exactly, they “want to believe” it, and not only people in the United States. But is it so?

 

First of all, as I have been saying repeatedly, we are not in a recession but in a depression. Most economists tend to have formal definitions of these terms, based primarily on rising prices in stock markets. They use these criteria to demonstrate growth and profit. And politicians in power are happy to exploit this nonsense. But neither growth nor profit is the appropriate measures.

 

There are always some people who are making profit, even in the worst of times. The question is how many people, and which people? In “good” times, most people are seeing an improvement in their material situation, even if there are considerable differences between those at the top and bottom of the economic ladder. A rising tide raises all ships, as the saying goes, or at least most ships.

 

But when the world-economy becomes stagnant, as the world-economy has been since the 1970s, several things happen. The numbers of people who are not gainfully employed and therefore receiving an income that is minimally adequate goes up considerably. And because this is so, countries try to export unemployment to each other. In addition, politicians tend to try to deprive the elderly retired persons and the young, pre-working-age persons of income in order to appease their voters in the usual working-age categories.

 

That is why, appraising the situation country by country, there are always some in which the situation looks much better than in most others. But which countries look better tends to shift with some rapidity, as it has been doing for the last forty years.

 

Furthermore, as the stagnation continues, the negative picture grows larger, which is when the media begin to talk of “crisis” and politicians look for quick fixes. They call for “austerity,” which means cutting pensions and education and child care even further. They deflate their currencies, if they can, in order that they reduce momentarily their unemployment rates at the expense of some other country’s employment rates.

 

Take the problem of government pensions. A small town in Alabama exhausted its pension fund in 2009. It declared bankruptcy and ceased paying its pensions, thereby violating state law which required it to do so. As the New York Times remarked, “It is not just the pensioners who suffer when a pension fund runs dry. If a city tried to follow the law and pay its pensioners with money from its annual operating budget, it would probably have to adopt large tax increases, or make huge service cuts, to come up with the money. Current city workers could find themselves paying into a pension plan that will not be there for their own retirements.”

 

But this is the looming problem for every state within the United States who, by law, must have balanced budgets, which means they cannot resort to borrowing to meet current budgetary needs. And there is a parallel problem for every nation within the euro zone who cannot deflate their currencies in order to meet their budgetary needs, which has meant that their ability to borrow leads to exorbitant unsustainable costs.

 

But what, you may ask, about those countries where the economy is said to be “booming” such as Germany and most particularly, within Germany, Bavaria – called by some “the planet of the happy.” Why then do Bavarians “feel a malaise” and seem “subdued and uncertain about their economic health”? The New York Times notes that “Germany’s good fortune…is widely viewed (in Bavaria) as having come at the expense of workers, who for the past decade have sacrificed wages and benefits to make their employers more competitive….In fact, part of the prosperity comes from people not getting the social security they should have.”

 

Well then, at least, there is the good example of the “emerging economies” which have been showing sustained growth during the last few years – especially the so-called BRIC countries. Look again. The Chinese government is very concerned about the loose lending practices of Chinese banks, which seem to be a bubble, and leading to the threat of inflation. One result is the sharp increase in layoffs in a country where the safety net for the unemployed seems to have disappeared. Meanwhile, the new president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, is said to be disturbed by the “overvalued” Brazilian currency amidst what she sees as the deflating U.S. and Chinese currencies that, together, are threatening the ability of Brazilian exports to be competitive. And the governments of Russia, India, and South Africa are all facing rumbling discontent from large parts of their populations who seemed to have escaped the benefits of presumed economic growth.

 

Finally, and not least, there are the sharp rises in the prices of energy, food, and water. This is the result of a combination of world population growth and increased percentages of people demanding access. This portends a struggle for these basic goods, a struggle that could turn deadly. There are two possible outcomes. One is that large numbers of people will reduce the level of their demand – most unlikely. The second is that the deadliness of the struggle results in a reduced world population and thereby fewer shortages – a most unpleasant Malthusian solution.

 

As we enter this second decade of the twenty-first century, it seems improbable that by 2020 we shall look back on this decade as one in which the “crisis” was relegated to a historical memory. It is not very helpful to “wish to believe” in a prospect that seems remote. It does not help in trying to figure out what we should do about it.--from here.

 

You love wallowing in negativity, don't you comrade?

[rob]

Does either side have any good proposals for actually creating jobs? I hear them both talk, but all of their ideas seem too small to really do anything. DO they even know? I think we have systemic problems. I'm just a lay-person in this field, but it seems to me that this is quite a difficult problem.

 

What would you suggest, prole? How do you increase confidence? My gut tells me to do the exact opposite of what the republicans want. They're controlled by rich interests that just want more money. But, the Democrats are so castrated they don't seem like they are talking about anything serious either.

 

Fucked.

[Jim]

You're not sure what the point is? The point is there's nothing on the horizon (private sector or otherwise) that's going to provide an engine for economic growth while putting to work large numbers of unemployed, underemployed, new workers entering the workforce, and those boomers who'll need to work for the next 15-20 years. The US, Europe, and Japan have been post-industrial for quite some time now and we've been puffing up our economies with a series of bubbles now since popped. American firms are fleeing this country's people as workers and as consumers to realize profits elsewhere. Our countries don't know what to do with our old people or our now-redundant populations. We're in debt to our eyeballs and the proposed austerity is going to bleed us into some very grim political territory when we're already seeing the balkanization of our social landscapes. Where's the next BIG idea and complex of institutional arrangements that's going to provide the framework for the next capitalist expansion and deliver what the world's people have come to expect from freedom?

 

Uh, yea. But the article you posted specifically addressed employers who were putting unemployed folks at the bottom of the candidate list. What is your point about that? Or was there any?

[j_b]

giving up on many millions of people with lots of experience on average in their profession (many of the people unemployed for years are older workers discarded because they cost more than younger workers with less experience) is a good indication of what structural unemployment is going to be from here on out and how much investing multinationals are planning on doing in this country.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

giving up on many millions of people with lots of experience on average in their profession (many of the people unemployed for years are older workers discarded because they cost more than younger workers with less experience) is a good indication of what structural unemployment is going to be from here on out and how much investing multinationals are planning on doing in this country.

 

another unintelligible run-on sentence

[j_b]

sentence too long for your pea brain, douchebag?

[tvashtarkatena]

DOOD. Make your life easier and use Ignore for those poor souls afflicted with excessive ball-sack-licking drive. You should have KKK's repertoire of 3 responses well memorized by now; you're basically responding to a wind up toy with a life support system attached.

 

 

[JayB]

You're not sure what the point is? The point is there's nothing on the horizon (private sector or otherwise) that's going to provide an engine for economic growth while putting to work large numbers of unemployed, underemployed, new workers entering the workforce, and those boomers who'll need to work for the next 15-20 years. The US, Europe, and Japan have been post-industrial for quite some time now and we've been puffing up our economies with a series of bubbles now since popped. American firms are fleeing this country's people as workers and as consumers to realize profits elsewhere. Our countries don't know what to do with our old people or our now-redundant populations. We're in debt to our eyeballs and the proposed austerity is going to bleed us into some very grim political territory when we're already seeing the balkanization of our social landscapes. Where's the next BIG idea and complex of institutional arrangements that's going to provide the framework for the next capitalist expansion and deliver what the world's people have come to expect from freedom?

 

There's no employment crisis that central planning can't make worse.

 

Transferring resources to the unemployed to help them stay afloat and letting employment expand wherever the real growth actually occurs is a much better option than having a central committee attempt to predict the future and borrow to make massive investments in a particular sector in anticipation of demand that may never actually materialize.

[Nitrox]

All the "bipartisan" budget talk is cute and all but...

 

Where are they going to come from?

 

Help Wanted — Jobless Need Not Apply

 

In 2008, Michelle, a 53-year-old Illinois resident with 19 years experience in information technology, became another casualty of the Great Recession. More than a year later, after a long and fruitless job search, she finally heard from a headhunter who thought she sounded like a great fit for a post he was looking to fill.

 

But when Michelle told him how long she had been out of work, the headhunter turned apologetic: His client, he said, wouldn't accept people who had been unemployed for more than six months. Michelle would go on to stay jobless for so long that she ultimately exhausted all her unemployment benefits, and, for the first time in her life, was forced to apply for food stamps and welfare.

 

Michelle's tale was recounted at a recent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) meeting devoted to the issue of hiring discrimination against the unemployed. As the commission found, Michelle's experience is far from unique. No one officially tracks how many job openings explicitly bar the unemployed, but several news reports since last summer have uncovered numerous online job postings that require candidates be employed during the application process. One such listing was posted by the cellphone giant Sony Ericsson--a move the company later called a "mistake."

 

Job-placement professionals say that over the last year, more and more employers have made it clear they won't consider job candidates who aren't working. "A lot of our recruiters have had clients who have come across this," Matt Deutsch of TopEchelon.com, which brings recruiters together to collaborate in finding jobs for candidates, told The Lookout, calling the practice "unfortunate."

 

With the number of Americans who have been out of work for six months or longer at a whopping 6.2 million, and with 4.7 unemployed workers for every job opening, advocates for the jobless say this growing form of hiring discrimination creates another hurdle for the increasingly desperate ranks of the unemployed. "At a moment when we all should be doing whatever we can to open up job opportunities to the unemployed, it is profoundly disturbing that the trend of deliberately excluding the jobless from work opportunities is on the rise," Christine Owens, who runs the National Employment Law Center, told the EEOC.

 

Some experts say that discrimination against the jobless, as currently practiced, may violate civil rights laws--a question the commission is now considering. In itself, such discrimination isn't illegal. (New Jersey is exploring legislation that would prohibit job ads telling the unemployed not to apply.) But it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or age. And African-Americans and older workers are disproportionately represented among the long-term unemployed--meaning they may be bearing the brunt of discrimination against the jobless.

 

The EEOC declined to say whether it's investigating specific cases of potential violations.

 

Some employers have said they're unwilling to hire unemployed workers because they believe that if a worker has once been let go, that's a sign that he or she is probably not a great hire. "People who are currently employed … are the kind of people you want as opposed to people who get cut," one recruiter told the Atlanta Journal Constitution in October.

 

And as Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke has said, when people are out of work for a long time, their skills can erode, which may understandably make them less attractive to employers.

 

But Deutsch said that a bias against the jobless is also a time-saving device for companies that may themselves be making do with less, thanks to the downturn. "If you've got a huge stack of submissions, and you want to get through them quickly, [you can say] 'OK, all the people who are not currently employed, forget them,' " Deutsch explained. "That's gonna cut down on your workload."

 

However, aside from the damage that this practice does to unemployed candidates, employers who adopt it may be shooting themselves in the foot, since they're probably screening out qualified applicants who were laid off through no fault of their own. "To think that that's going to bring you all the qualified candidates you want to see is probably not the case," Deutsch said.

 

This is a common hiring policy. Being unemployed for 12 months generally points to a larger problem with the applicant. Unemployment insurance should be a safety net, not an excuse for a 12 month vacation (which what a lot of people are using it for).

 

 

 

 

[j_b]

so where are the many millions jobs that need to be created to re-employ all the long-term unemployed?

 

Myth making about the laziness of the unemployed is more evidence of your belonging to the social Darwinist party.

[prole]

Transferring resources to the unemployed to help them stay afloat and letting employment expand wherever the real growth actually occurs is a much better option than having a central committee attempt to predict the future and borrow to make massive investments in a particular sector in anticipation of demand that may never actually materialize.

 

Great for a petri dish, not so good for Earthlings.

 

"Central planning". Good one...