Get a Job! (RANT/VENT)

[rahmota]

Everytime I hear someone say that phrase especially when its tied to the comment "OH you dont like being poor?, Then get a job!" It makes me so sick and tired and angry that I want to slap the person saying that into the next kingdom.

Why you might ask? Its because that comment right there automatically assumes that the person is poor or unemployed because they are lazy or worthless or that its all their fault they are in the condition they are in. It puts all of the blame on the person being addressed in such a smug, arrogant and uppity manner.

Lets get a few things straight here. Amerika is not the land of fair and equal opportunities for all that it may have once been (back in the days of washington and jefferson maybe!) or idealistically supposed to be. Now a days corporate amerika has such a bounty of people to pick and choose from that they can afford to throw people away and not give someone a chance to try and proove they are an effective employee just becausze they managed to get a bad credit score, have something wrong with their history, made a stupid mistake and paid for it but still cant get a job because society doesnt care!

Capitalism in Amerika is setup for the rich, by the rich and of the rich. The little guys do not always get the same lucky chances that someone from a more upper crust section or region of the country might have.
Parts of this country are very poor when it comes to jobs.

And what jobs there are available in general are not the great ones that a person can raise a family on on. Most wageslave positions dont pay enough for an average family of 3 to be above the federal poverty level.

Not to mention that you who so smugly look down on that unemployed and poor person from your ivory tower should stop and think about how close to the edge you live. What would happen if you got downsized or thrown out on the street by the companny closing the office and outsourceing your job to some third world nation they could pay their employees in shiny beads and trinkets instead of even the pathetic wages that they pay amerikan citizens. Think you have a position of safety? Ha! Companies do not have loyalty to their employees and they wonder why their employees do not have loyalty to them.

Look at the stock market> Anytime a company announces somethign that would be good for the country, good for its employees or good for society in general their stocks go DOWN! But if its somethign that will hurt the employees, hurt the country, or hurt society in gernal like closing a plant or cutting benefits their stocks go UP! How sick and disgusting and wrong is that? Thats the kind of trashy BS that makes me sick.

What needs to be done is to make credit checks for jobs ILLEGAL. Its already immoral and indecent and just another way the rich and corporate amerika can discriminate against people.

PENALIZE companies that take jobs from amerika and send them overseas into sweat shops and third world nations. 1/2 to 2/3 of their profits for each year for each job they take out of this country. ie they take 40 jobs out of this country then for the next 40 years at least 1/2 their profits should be taken from them so they can make right the wages they caused to be lost from this country and if they take over a 100 jobs then the penalty should increase to 3/4th of their profits or somethign painful to them. The CEo in charge of loosing these jobs should be made to personally walk in chains to the house of every employee he throws into unemployment and apologize for being a greedy scumbag.

Make any raise for management or upper level people dependent on the wageslaves getitng a raise first. Any Bonus or profit sharing has to be assigned from the bottom of the company upwards.

Any company that makes over a million dollars in profits (Like the oil companies) must pay that profit into a general fund to share with the peopl ethey have exploited that profit from. As thats the only way a company could get those kinds of profits.

PROFIT is the funds left over after ALL expenses have been met. Payroll, research, development etc....

This I know may not make as much sense as I should or could but I am irate right now beyond all capability to be coherent because of this sort of arrogance on people's part.

[Rapscallion]

The alternative is for people to form cooperatives and compete with the big nasties, with each member having equal rights etc.

That's where I am. Equal pay rate per hour for everyone. Every member has a vote in the policies of the company.

Rapscallion

[Greenday]

And people say Communism is bad. W00t for Communism! Equality for ALL.

[AFPheonix]

The theory for communism isn't bad. However, in practice, it IS bad. Why? Because there will always be some assholes who don't want to share or want to be equal with the masses. And those assholes are usually in charge.

[Greenday]

Well, yea, the people who lead take most of the money, then what little money is left is spread out among everyone else, meaning they don't get much cash. Damn greedy people.

[ArenaBoy]

"The reason why communism failed? People like to own things."

Frank Zappa.

[rahmota]

No communism has never been given a chance on a national scale to this date. That was socialism which is a totally different breed and they just called themselves communists. They where a breed of powerhungrey jerks who took the name and the dream and the ideal of communism and perverted it into somethign horrible and self-serving for the burgeoise ruling elite. Not too much different than the way things are in modern day amerika.

Our ruling elite is the upper crust of corporate amerika. They do whatever it takes to oppresse and keep social mobility to a minimum in this country.

True communism can if it can be kept from being perverted by the greedy bastards like Dubya, the oil company execs, etc.... would be more beneficial in the long run for all of humanity. It would mean people getting off their lazy butts and taking a more active role in their own lives and the lives of those aorund them. Joining together in cooperatives and actually cooperating for the common good instead of just trying to amass the most personal gain and wealth that they possible can exploit as under the oppresive regime of capitalism.

I mean look at business practices as they are today? It takes good credit to get a job but if you dont have good credit then you cant get a job, if you dont have good credit you cant get a college degree unless you bury yourself under so much loan debt that it will take you the rest of your life to dig out and then there is no gaurentee that you will have a job when you do graduate college.

Which is part of what my original comments where abobut. This system is flawed and doomed to failure. When someone says get a job where are people supposed to get this job from if there are no jobs out there or what jobs there are ,are dead man's boots to get into? Are people supposed to just pull one out of their arse? People say get an education. How? when tuitions are rising and grants and such are getting tighter and starting out already deep in the hole in debt then only the children of the rich who can afford to pay out of their pockets for college are able to get a decent education. The rich are able to wield their money as political power to control the destinies of cities and towns and counties all across the country moving jobs and people aroud like it was pawns on a gameboard. And when it tires them or they no longer profit from a company here they move it offshore and dont look back to think of what they have down to the lives of the people they throw out of work.

But no matter what you call it capitalism fails to provide a morally fair, or equitable distribution of resources to all people regardless of their social class. It is an exploitative and discriminatory process. And unless you are born into the right social class then good luck doing anything to move upwards. But heavens help you as one wrong step and down the ladder you go.

[Fuzzykitten99]

Here's a thought- Who said life was supposed to be fair? So some people have to work harder to get ahead in life? Doesn't mean that they can't get ahead. Those who have the money to provide a better life for their kids are no less human than the ones who have to live paycheck to paycheck. They have likely worked for it, thus they deserve to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

If your credit is coming into play for getting a job, that is your fault, not the employer's. If you made a mistake in your life that is jeopardizing your job prospects, again, how is that the fault of anyone else but yourself? You have to live with the consequences of your choices and mistakes. If what you did makes you a potential liability to the company you applied to, well, they have to protect their company from that if need be.

You also don't have to have a college education to succeed in life. I have no college education and neither does my husband. Yet I have extensive hands-on experience in office & customer service as well as foodservice. My husband is making $25/hour in his field, which he has worked in since graduating high school. I own 3 of my own businesses. One being my own home daycare, the other is wedding consulting, and the third is Pure Romance consultant. Just doing that, I have gained bookkeeping, accounting, and management experience. So when I decide to quit daycare in few years, I will have even more experience with more areas desireable to employers under my belt to get a better job than I did before I started the daycare. And this is if I am not able to open my own bridal shop at the time that I want to do so.

My mother-in-law has no college education either, yet she has worked her way up from secretary making about $7/hr at the company she works for, to a licensed real estate abstractor & loan closer/processor for that same company. She makes something like $70k/year. But it also took her about 15 years to get to that point. Before she started as a secretary there, she worked nights at Target, and before that, she was a stay-at-home mom with my husband and his older brother.

Really, it sounds like you are just suffering a huge bout of envy. Stop bitching, suck it up, and get out there and take some personal responsibility. You mistakes are your problem, and the potential employer doesn't want your problems to become an issue in the workplace. There are jobs out there. Jobs that pay so-called poverty level don't require a lot of skills. Thus the payscale reflects the amount of responsibility and knowledge. Why do you think a doctor gets paid so much vs. a retail employee? Because he has spent the time and the money to get where he is and he has to know his shit to keep his job and keep from getting sued. If you don't have many skills, you'll need to start at the bottom and work your way up to learning new ones. But if you work hard and set goals, you'll get there, and it will feel all the better when you achieve something you have earned and worked for.

[Boozy]

Here's a thought- Who said life was supposed to be fair?

That's very defeatist.

I don't see the problem with evaluating our society and its laws and deciding how we might provide the deserving with better chances in life.

Certainly every step we have taken for the good of society - movement towards equality and democracy, the civil rights movement, women's suffrage, etc., has been a result of someone saying, "Life's not fair...but let's see what we can do about that."

[Greenday]

Doesn't sound too defeatest to me. Sounds more like, there's nothing you can do about fairness in life so there's no point in worrying about it.

[Puckishone]

I know I'm taking a chance by paraphrasing, but I think that FuzzyKitten was trying to say this: No matter how much good we do, no matter anyone's best intentions, sometimes fecal matter occurs and it's nothing to do with "fairness." Don't we all know at least one person that we'd call "good" or "decent," who is hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying...and forever (or at least it seems) getting the short end of some particular stick? Sometimes it's the roll of the dice that determines who gets the goodies, and sometimes it's hard work. Since it's pretty damned tough to tell which one at times, it just adds another unnecessary dose of drama to one's life obsessing over it. That's certainly not to say that we shouldn't fight the good fight to get rid of as much overt discrimination as we can, though.

That said, I agree (to a point) with the envy argument as well. If you measure your "success" by money flowing out every orifice and toys in the big, splashy house, then you're always going to be lagging behind someone who has bigger, shinier toys. It's your choice to focus on the material...and you can choose not to. Having not come "from money" myself, I understand the temptation to use the Goodie Yardstick, but I've also learned that it's ultimately self-defeating; it's a game you can't win.

[rahmota]

Greenday: actually that sounds very, VERY, Defeatest to me. Sounds a lot like the rhetoric that was used against the civil rights movement back in the sixties, against equal rights for all. Lifes not fair so you might as well shut up and accept your place in it. The rally cry of the oppressor. Boozy is right the freedoms and rights that have been wrestle out of the oppressors hands have been done so because people got sick and tired of being told lifes not fair and decided to try and make a difference and MAKE it fair.

Now on to your post FUzzy:

Who said life was supposed to be fair?

Lets see the bible, (New testament, Jesus was the first communist), the constitution/bill of rights, the declaration of human rights by the UN, among other great and historical documents.

They have likely worked for it, thus they deserve to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Ah! yeah right this one is a common capitalist apoligista comment. Did you know the top 1% of american soceity controls 30% of the wealth in this country? And of those top percent none of them have had to work a day in their lives for that wealth. It was all handed to them on a silver platter by their mommies and daddies. Remember how G. Bush was stumped by a bar code reader because he had never set foot in a grocery store before that photo opp. He had always had people go do that sort of stuff for him. One of the perks of being a member of the social elite in the american empire.

If your credit is coming into play for getting a job, that is your fault, not the employer's

Could you please explain to me how a person's credit is a valid or effective indicator of their ability to do their job? This sort of comment automatically assumes that the person who has bad credit or is poor is the one to blame for all the problems. Because of course we cannot blame society or the corporate attitude of treating people like toilet paper. Use them up and throw them away when it becomes a threat to the ceo's bonus. Gods know we have to make sure he can afford his second yacht or third mercades. Credit only shows whether the person is of the right social class or not. It does not show if they are lazy, or a threat to a job or a liability.A good hard working person who gets behind in one bill can wind up with poor credit. Especially as companies dont care if they screw you over or not. All you are to them is just one more number. It is just one more tool companies and corporate america uses to oopress poor people and discriominate against those not of the right social class. Credit checks as a hurdle to getting a job should be outlawed and punishable by hefty fines for the company just like litteracy checks for voting where a hurdle for blacks after the civil war. Same sort of discrimination different method and era.

No you dont need college to get a good job but it sure helps. Although the local mcds has a manager who has a 4 year degree in CIS because there are NO CIS jobs in this area. If there are no jobs then how are people supposed to get jobs? Just magically pull one out of their ass? I talked to the local Job Services officer today. They have in their system for my home county 14 jobs listed. There are 1600 people listed in the system looking for jobs. You tell me whats supposed to happen there? Oh its nothign personal its just business. Thats what every assassin says. "Well just move." Yeah right where and how? It take smoney to do those things and if a person doesnt have money to being with how are they going to get the money to go do that.

I am so happy that you and your husband are lucky enough to be living good right now. What exactly would happen should he roll a truck over or something happen to him where he looses his job? How about the company decides to move out from under him? I'm glad you've picked up a lot fo skills. I've run several businesses myself, I run a farm right now as a matter of fact. I have enough skills, and letters and titles and certificates to choke a mule. Is that getting jobs no. Why? Because there are NOT ENOUGH JOBS TO BE HAD! There are more people looking for work in this entire region than there are jobs to be had. Jobs of any kind. You have 30 year ford mechanics pushing trays at the local burger joint because the ford plant shut down. You have contruction workers pushing brooms becuase construction is actually laying people off. The local walmart actually has a hiring freeze on. There are no jobs to be had. So tell me when there are no jobs to be had how does one suppose to be able to get a job? Just go out and create one? yeah right have you seen the amount of money required to start a business or the liscences and fees and then you have to have a business to be able to compete against the already established businesses. There are 8 other guys in a 3 miles radius from where I sit now who have hung a sign out in their yard offering to do oil changes or other light auto work.

Really, it sounds like you are just suffering a huge bout of envy. Stop bitching, suck it up, and get out there and take some personal responsibility. You mistakes are your problem,

ENVY? ahha. This is anger we are talking about right here and now my dear. Anger at the arrogant smug rich scumbags who look down their noses at the poor and less fortunate . Anger at how they act like you are a leper or going to jump on them and mug them just because you drive an older car or dress in not so fancy clothes. Anger at how they have to flaunt their welath in fancy gas guzzling SUVS that have never have and will never see the slightest bit of mud and yet complain because the price of gas is too high. People who move out to the country and build on good farmland 250,000$ houses and then complain that everything is too far from their home and how they hate the bugs and animals and all the slow moving vehicles. Well if you wanted city life then maybe you should have stayed in the city bitcvh!

And that portion I bolded and underlined is an example of the sick arrogant, egotistical, presumptious, superiority complex BS crap that goes on in this world. Its blaming the person automatically for all their problems. It doesnt take into account that there might just be extenuating circumstances in that person's life. It doesnt take into account that maybe they had some bad breaks with the crappy economy that we liuve in now. Because of course we must all swallow whatever lie sbig business and the government tell us about how wonderful our econmy is while companies lay people off left and right and ship jobs overseas so they can cut costs while still paying the big wigs their exorbanent salaries. No of course we cannot blame corporations or our society so we must blame the victim. I swear comments like that are just as bad as saying that a rape victim deserves to be attacked because they where asking for it.

so-called poverty level

Oh so you dont believe in the poverty level? You dont believe that there are people who dont make enough money to survive in this world? Or what is it that you have to say so-called poverty level?

There are jobs out there

Really where? Not around here. It is a regional thing only. So using the broad brush strokes that everyone is able to just walk out and get a job, any frakkin job is BS.

Those who have the money to provide a better life for their kids are no less human than the ones who have to live paycheck to paycheck

And in clsoing I will say this. Just because a person has money does not make them "better" or give them a "better" life. All it does is make them have an easier life and maybe less stressful but poor people at least know who their friends are and that their family is with them because they are family and not out for their money.

[Rapscallion]

I don't have time to get involved in this to any great degree, but the poverty level is an interesting statistic. A charity over here was screaming about poverty levels being far too big, and had made enough noise to be invited onto a television show. The interviewer went through the basic questions about the campaign and then asked, "So, what is the poverty level you use as a yardstick? What income do you define as poverty level?"

"Well, we regard anyone in the lowest ten percent of earners to be suffering from poverty..."

"So, there are always going to be ten percent of the population in poverty no matter what you do?"

Shot them down quick.

Depends how you measure it.

Rapscallion

[rahmota]

Puck: I dont know about that interpretation. That did not exactly sound like what she was saying to me. To me it sounded like she was trying to blame the poor people for their problems. That if you're poor its your fault.

And by an objective standard not just keeping up with the jonses poverty is all about being able to maintain a lifestyle of your own choosing without having to deal with crediters and bills and figuring out who to not pay for the month or who to pay. Its about not having to worry about the kids going hunggry or sick because you didnt have the money to do anythign about it. By an objective standard it is about having at least as much money coming in as money going out. Something that can be controlled by both sides of the equation but is not helped when business and companies and society in general is set up to make it harder for poor people to dig themselves out of any holes or have less than equal chances at getting resources to support themselves.

Raps: the resources I use and quote measure poverty by the amount of money coming in against the amount of money going out for an average family. Not barring that there could be differences in measureing, estimation, rounding errors etc... I will try not to quote any figures or numbers that are as wildly off as the ones you showed. That is a group being dishonest with the facts which does not help the situation any.

[squall]

My question is to rahmota. Why spell America with a 'k', as in Amerika? I'm guessing it has come symbolic meaning?