anyone else bored and disheartened and sick of applying for jobs that never get back?

[MA]

hot

[Wings of Fire]

Anyone who still thinks workfare is a good idea (OANST masterfully deflected the argument last week) this is a damn good read.

[MA]

It doesn't matter how much reactionary rhetoric the right-wing press spew about the unemployed, nor how often government ministers and DWP employees call people without jobs "idle" or "scrounger" and complain that they are getting "handouts" - thier bile doesn't make mandatory labour confiscation schemes any less wrong or any less economically illiterate.
The tendency to vilify the unemployed is a classic example of the "blame the symptom, not the cause" propaganda strategy.

The real people to blame for the scale of unemployment are the politicians and central bankers that believe in the neoliberal equilibrium unemployment theory. This orthodox economic theory states that greater profitability can be achieved by deliberately driving down wages and working conditions through the creation of false abundance in the labour market by retaining a permanent pool of unemployment. This deliberate economic policy is known as the "reserve army of unemployment" as Marx defined it in the 19th century, or as the "price worth paying" as it was described by former Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont in 1991.

The whole idea of maintaining a huge reserve of unemployed people is ludicrous. A vast standing army of unemployed people may reduce wages and appear to create private sector profits, but these profits are eclipsed at the national scale by the increased cost of welfare for this vast pool of unemployed labour. Then there are the stunningly obvious fact that national productivity is reduced if millions of workers have no jobs to go to, and aggregate demand is reduced if millions of people have no wages to spend.

Think of it this way: The vast majority of unemployed people are just ordinary working people who happen to be without jobs because of the way the economy is being deliberately mismanaged. They are not getting "handouts" because they paid for their benefits through National Insurance contributions when they did have jobs. Yes there are some feckless people, but they are massively outnumbered by the unemployed who have worked before and would much rather earn a decent wage instead of living on the pittance that the state provides to those without work.

If you must get angry at the unemployment situation, perhaps it might be a tad more rational to get angry at the people who have been deliberately mismanaging the economy over the last three and a half decades in order to create a huge supply of surplus labour in order to drive down wages and subsidise corporate profits..

As it is now, there are millions of unemployed people chasing hundreds of thousands of jobs. In many areas there are literally hundreds of applicants for every single menial low paid job. Once you recognise that there are more unemployed people than there are jobs, and that this is a result of deliberate macroeconomic policies, you must recognise that it is the system, not the unemployed people themselves that are to blame for high levels of unemployment.

It will only be when the public put pressure on the state to abandon the defunct neoliberal pseudo-economic theories that demand a constant pool of unemployed people, that full employment will return.

If full employment ever does return, and there are plenty of vacancies for everyone that wants to work (like there were between the early 1950s and the mid 1970s) then feel free to return to getting angry at the minority of people who still choose to be unemployed when there are plenty of jobs to go around, but until then, perhaps you should use your brain and direct your anger at the real culprits.

holy shit we should burn the tories. seriously. we should do Oliver Cromwell again, but better.

I AM NOT A NUMBER etc

[MeechMunchie]

According to the Department for Work and Pensions, I'm #PA076278A.

[STM]

Brb impersonating MM for jobs.

[MeechMunchie]

Good luck, it's fake.

[STM]

you probably just posted some poor sod's NI number to OWF.

[Wings of Fire]

Geoffrey Wood; your identity is mine!

[Bullet Magnet]

[Wings of Fire]

A picture speaks a thousand words; or in this case fifty two and a hyphen.

[gishygleb]

Parasite'n'Proud of it.

[STM]

Honestly, the bigger parasites are the leeching multimillionaires who don't pay a penny's tax on their earnings, weaseling out through loopholes and obscurities in the law whilst leeching off the tax subsidised structures they take for granted, such as the NHS. It's pathetic as they're the ones that get away with it more than your average joe benefits fraudster.

[Wings of Fire]

UKIP councilor uses police as private security force. Police are extremely sheepish about it, but oblige anyway.

Apparently I now live in a fascist state?

[STM]

Fortunately Ukip is a piddling little far-right extremist political group that has only gained any sway because the big three parties are so homogenised. Ukip'll fall flat at the next election.

I hope.

I really fucking hope.

[Wings of Fire]

Fortunately Ukip is a piddling little far-right extremist political group that has only gained any sway because the big three parties are so homogenised. Ukip'll fall flat at the next election.

I hope.

I really fucking hope.

You mean UKIP won't rise to relevance on the promise that they're nothing like the other three parties and then completely betray their electorate by creating a UKIP-Tory coalition, thus ushering in five more years of our country slowly dying only this time with added government mandated racism?

[STM]

It's just a shame the Lib Dems are more of a protest party than anything, a lot of liberals have no one to throw their vote at, and when we thought we did, they betrayed us (hello £9000pa uni fees).

[Bullet Magnet]

I see no one to vote for at all, and I don't especially want to share responsibility for the shit that does go down by helping any of them get in.

[STM]

I'll probably end up voting Green, partly because I side with a lot of their believes and partly because they'll never make it into government, thus denying all the major parties of my vote. Green Party hates nuclear power though for some reason.

[Nate]

Hey, everyone! Remember that thread we used to have about job-hunting that was only ever about politics and arthropods when those topics were relevant to job-hunting? I do, and I'd like it back, thanks!




So, I'm back from Amsterdam. Flunked the interview when I was hit by jetlag pretty badly halfway through. Didn't get offered the job, but had a lovely holiday.

I'm not disappointed though, as I did get the job in Seattle, with a rather nice paycheque and all sorts of bonuses, although the annual leave offered is both shitty and non-negotiable. I'm interviewing people from two teams tomorrow to decide which one I want to work for. Other than that, no idea when I'll actually be starting. Probably not for a month or so, as I've got to deal with background checks and visas and shit.

[Wings of Fire]

WHY THE FUCK IS THIS ALLOWED

[STM]

What, the purple comic sans?

[Xavier]

The vagueness?

[Wings of Fire]

The purple comic sans, the lack of grammar, the vagueness, the everything.

This is a professional job advertising site. That's revolting.

[Varrok]

Apply.

[MeechMunchie]

But write the email in purple comic sans.

[Wings of Fire]

Apply.

I did. They sent me an email back just yesterday apologizing but saying they were looking for someone with more professional experience.

[Varrok]

Oh burn

[STM]

Please just send a one word reply:

Irony.



Also I think I'm gonna try and get into culinary school when I get back to the UK so I can start this pursuit towards owning my own deli. Well, before then though I'm thinking I might do a window cleaning business out the back of a van or something similar, just to cover rent while I give it one last whack at writing my manuscript. If I can't get my novel off the ground then I'm gonna finally have to say welcome to the real world, population: billions of broken dreams.

[Nate]

In order to keep getting unemployment benefits from now until when I actually start the job I've been offered (which I don't know when that'll be, as there's bureaucracy going on at the moment), I need to keep applying for more jobs. I didn't want to have to deal with interviews, so I searched out jobs that were vaguely in the realm of what I do, but for which I'm simultaneously underqualified and overqualified. Underqualified in that I have no practical experience doing things like software testing, and overqualified in that they're looking for people coming out of undergraduate degrees, not PhDs with PhD wage expectations.

Last week I applied for 10 jobs. Within 24 hours I'd had phone calls or emails for four or five of them. I never had that good a response even when I was applying for jobs I'm capable of doing!

[Xavier]

Is that's the proof that people should apply for anything, even things they are not qualified for?

Oh by the way did someone here ever lie about having any kind of proffesional experience? If yes, how did it turn out?