The New York Times describes the survival jobs of a number of people in Forced Down the Job Ladder. The new “survival job” is one that pays some of the bills and is only taken after searching for a much higher paying, higher prestige job:
Interviews with more than two dozen laid-off professionals across the country, including architects, former sales managers and executives who have taken on lower-paying, stop-gap jobs to help make ends meet, found that they were working for places like U.P.S., a Verizon Wireless call center and a liquor store. For many of the workers, the psychological adjustment was just as difficult as the financial one, with their sense of identity and self-worth upended.
“It has been like peeling back the layers of a bad onion,” said Ame Arlt, 53, who recently accepted a position as a customer-service representative at an online insurance-leads referral service in Franklin, Tenn., after 20 years of working in executive jobs. “With every layer you peel back, you discover something else about yourself. You have to make an adjustment.”
It’s worth noting how much competition there is for these “survival jobs.” They are not necessarily easy to get.
Stainless steel is the new plastic (or perhaps the old plastic). Whatever it is, stainless steel is very in right now, and provides the materials for the tiffin carrier, stackable tiers of storage for food. It’s a nice option for carrying your lunch to work or school, particularly if you have a container fetish (you know who you are!).
Other lunchbox options that we have discussed here (the enviable bento box), here (vegan lunches, vegetarian lunches, and bento), and here (cutlery, carrying case, napkins, and beverage containers).
I think my title says it all: Office Worker Sacked.
I’m sure her job was boring because other employees must have had extra time on their hands as they were digging around in her facebook profile.
The cheese sandwich rears its ugly head!
You may recall that way back in June of 2007 parents who didn’t pay their kid’s school lunch tab were punished by having their kid eat a cheese sandwich rather than receive a regular hot lunch. Well, that’s now the situation in Albuquerque. You fail to give your kid money for lunch—the school gives him or her a stigmatized cheese sandwich. And keep in mind that kids on free lunch always get the hot lunch, not the sandwich.
I’m not sure why this particular attempt at problem solving is so intriguing. But it’s too bad the kids can’t get a hot lunch, and the parents can’t get the cheese sandwich.
It’s fairly well documented that many office workers steal supplies, but apparently many also steal data, especially upon “termination”:
The survey, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, said that so-called malicious insiders use the information to get a new job, start their own business or for revenge.
“They are making these judgements based out of fear and anxiety,” the Institute’s Mike Spinney told BBC News.
“People are worried about their jobs and want to hedge their bets,” he said.
“Our study showed that 59% of people will say ‘I’m going to take something of value with me when I go’.”
The Ponemon Institute, a privacy and management research firm, surveyed 945 adults in the United States who were laid-off, fired or changed jobs in the last 12 months.
Everyone that took part had access to proprietary information such as customer data, contact lists, employee records, financial reports, confidential business documents, software tools or other intellectual property.
I’m guessing that if someone felt unfairly laid-off or fired, he or she would be much more likely to take data than someone who simply changed jobs (though all of those categories are grouped together in the survey).
But you probably already knew that, right?
Is Your Job Killing You? details how what we do at work contributes (or erodes) our health:
Our work is intricately tied up with our well being, says Nortin Hadler, a professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and an attending rheumatologist at that university’s hospitals. And we know that losing a job is bad for your health, not only from a financial perspective but from a psychosocial one, too. When you lose your job, you lose social ties and, often, the very structure of your life. After a major downsizing among municipal workers in Finland, the risk of death from a heart attack went up fivefold for those who lost their jobs. It’s unclear whether the same mortality trends seen in Europe persist here; studies are ongoing. Gallo says evidence in the United States has been mixed, but research has found that people who lost a job in their 50s were more than twice as likely to have a heart attack or stroke in the next decade.
I have had a horrible time at work the past few weeks. The kind of thing that makes you cry, want to drink, and fall into bed at ungodly hours and then lie awake brooding, we’ve all been there. Luckily, it appears to be almost over, and I think I have convinced our boss to reward us with pizza. We’ll do anything for pizza, apparently.
I suppose, though, that I should be grateful to have a job. After all, I could be in the same boat as these people, and be facing the horror of having my 5-digit bonus be cut in half so I couldn’t afford to go to Paris.
On the other end of the spectrum, I could have been shot at work while rescuing a woman from her attacker, and then been denied worker’s comp.
If I had gone to a bar to drink away my sorrows, I could have been beaten up by bouncers for not using a coaster.
But I am comforted to know that if I lose my job, I could give blood, or make my husband donate sperm, for money AND career advice. Too bad I’m too old to donate my eggs or ovaries.
And if I do get fired, I certainly hope it’s not for having cancer.
Nonetheless, I am somewhat bummed I don’t work for this guy.
Okay, I have to go to my second job, namely taking care of my sick and prostrate husband before he dies of malnutrition. Hope you all have a great week.
Yes, I do know how to spell farewell, but there’s a story here. Once when I worked for a big publishing company as an editor, the intern was dismissed at the end of the term. On her last day, she sent an email to everyone with the subject line “farwell” and I thought, Intern, as much as I like you, this is a good example of why you are being dismissed and not hired. You can’t be an editor and be a terrible speller. Just use the spellcheck.
Hit ’send,’ then hit the door has some funny “farwell” emails. I would always choose to err on the side of cautiousness with a polite email, but I still found the emails amusing. Apparently these sorts of humorous or confessional emails are the result of two trends:
Will Schwalbe, coauthor of “Send: Why People E-mail So Badly and How to Do it Better,” said the farewell e-mail was a reflection of two intersecting trends: the universality of e-mail and the confessional spirit of the times, which have resulted, as he put it, in “the democratization of the process.”
In the pre-computer world, Schwalbe said, “Personnel wrote something — a memo, Xeroxed — generally, you didn’t get to do it. They did it. But what had been an HR function is now a personal function.” That, he said, leads to a different sort of message.
As you may discover from some of my recent posts, I’m ready for a job change. Possibly a career change. I thought this little article, Take This Job, and… , was helpful:
What if I have the desire and talent to design clothes but must hold down a desk job because I have four kids and am up to my neck in bills?
If your reason for doing nothing is that life got in the way—that’s a trap. We’re all living in the same economy, but while some people change jobs, most don’t.
Nobody can write a book when she has a job, bills and kids. Except for the person who wrote the book while she had the job, bills and kids. Except Danielle Steele, who had nine kids.
Maybe you have to take the design course on Saturdays and get up at 4:30 a.m. to do your sketches. Either you have that creative outlet or you have reasons.
I sort of think stockings are useless. But not true! They can be recycled in 10 useful ways (much more useful than their original purpose). And I can vouch for 9 of 10 of those recycling solutions. My grandmother always recycled her stockings. I just never saw her make a fan belt out of them.
Periodically someone will ask me a question about unemployment, and usually I have no idea how to answer as unemployment is fairly complicated. Here’s a primer: Unemployment insurance.
We’ve written a fair amount about prejudice against folks in the workplace due to weight: bias against obese people at work and weight discrimination as prevalent as racial discrimination. But we also make judgments about others based on height. Here’s part of the abstract for some research on height discrimination:
At first blush, the concept of real height discrimination is almost laughable. After all, we don’t typically think of height when we discuss types of discrimination. Yet there is no denying that we place a high premium on height, be it social, sexual, or economic, and our preference for height pervades almost every aspect of our lives. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith - who towered at 6′8″ - described the favored treatment we afford taller people as “one of the most blatant and forgiven prejudices in our society.” If you don’t believe it, consider whether you yourself would like to be taller and, if so, try putting your finger on the reason why.
I’m willing to bet that height discrimination actually plays out differently for women and men. For example, I, at 5′10”, certainly do not want to be any taller, and wouldn’t mind being shorter. I used to get lots of comments, and probably still would if I hadn’t perfected a Stop Talking Now look while teaching high school.
You can read the entire abstract here.
In this week’s mini-roundup, articles address expertise and likability:
Positioning Yourself as an Expert will help your business, and, possibly, get you paid more. However, Are You Focused on the Right Thing? suggests that expertise alone will not get you hired.
So here I am with Presidents Day off and two things cross my mind: 1) Wow I miss the good old days when I got two holidays instead of one and 2) shouldn’t there be an apostrophe in there somewhere? (Wikipedia says it can be Presidents’ Day as well, so I guess I’m right.)
In honor of Presidents, today we will focus on the economy.
You would think in this economy that people would want to keep their jobs. Not so with this guy, who trashed the restaurant where he worked, because he wanted to be fired and get unemployment instead. I would be inclined to keep him permanently on the payroll, just not scheduled for any shifts–that is, assuming he is an hourly employee with no benefits.
Meanwhile, Germans are increasingly turning to doping to enhance workplace performance. “While men preferred efficiency-increasing supplements, their female co-workers often resorted to sedatives.”
In our two education-related stories this week, a teacher skipped class in order to go turn a trick in a motel. Sadly, this is nothing new in Uganda.
For the other education-related story I must give a little anecdote about how in junior high, one of the students raised cash for a class trip to DC by selling candy during lunch and recess. He was forced to stop on the grounds that he was taking profits away from the student council store. Anyway, he would have turned way more of a profit if he had done as this kid did, and charged $37,000 worth of candy to the school.
And finally, here’s a story about a non-profit organization that trains prisoners to be entrepreneurs. Now, it does involve Ms T.’s least favorite word, “productive.” But it also decreases the recidivism rate. And, if you have seen The Wire, you’ll know that it’s probably a good thing to keep business savvy criminals on Wall Street where they belong.
Okay, I am off to do something far less productive with my life, as our founding fathers envisioned. Have a great week!
Once you start seeing things within the generational conflict paradigm, you will see it everywhere: how you interact with your coworkers, your boss, even your parents.
Here is one summary on the Harvard Business Blog of the four biggest reasons for intergenerational conflict within work teams:
Choosing where and how we work
Communicating among team members
Getting together
Finding information on new things
More explanation of the details here. I’m particularly struck by the “where and how we work” plays out with some jobs (supervised by Baby Boomers) requiring attendance from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. rather religiously as if work must only occur during those hours and in a certain place.
I’m trying to figure out how exactly the stimulus package will play out in terms of money to ordinary folks, and other folks are also thinking about who exactly would be helped. Will the Stimulus Help Harriet Hughes? examines whether the 789 billion will help Henrietta Hughes, the woman who spoke to Obama at the rally in Fort Myers. How will the stimulus plan affect you? examines the benefits for us ordinary folks. And Stimulus Bill’s Tax Breaks and Benefits and What Will the Stimulus Plan Get You? do more of the same. I still can’t find anything terribly helpful in the description other than the $800 tax credit for married couples filing jointly. Looks like some help if you are buying a car or house though.
You might enjoy Top 20 Dream Jobs. Turns out many of us want to make wine.
And, of course, while poking around I found 8 Things You Might Not Know about Chinese Food with the most disgusting photo of some pseudo Chinese dish. Oh my. I could just throw up looking at that photo.
I suspect a wiki might be the perfect way for me and my business partner to work on our business plan together. But I’m struggling with figure out exactly how to set up a wiki. Any ideas? Any experiences? I’d like it password protected, but that’s about my only constraint.
I keep wondering where exactly my bailout package is (Answer: I’m not getting one). I have a small business. It’s gone from great to okay to not okay in the past year. But no bailout. Meanwhile the bankers continue to party. Except sometimes when the public is alerted they have to stop the party.
Ah, we’ve talked about the benefits of working with your spouse, but there’s a downside too: You can both be laid off at the same time:
It may seem harsh for an employer to lay off both spouses simultaneously. But companies risk lawsuits and union contract violations if they consider workers’ family status in determining who to eliminate.
And whatever the financial risks, it is simply unrealistic to expect couples who fall in love on the job or while studying the same field in school to be thinking about revenue diversification, said Stephanie Coontz, a family studies professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
I know the first time I met Jim I thought, “Revenue diversification!”
A few days ago, the New York Times had this little article, You Try and Live on 500K in New York, which threw out some figures for how difficult it will be for banking executives to live on the Obama-suggested limit of 500K a year. This excerpt should give you a sense of the expenses:
Barbara Corcoran, a real estate executive, said that most well-to-do families take at least two vacations a year, a winter trip to the sun and a spring trip to the ski slopes.
Total minimum cost: $16,000.
A modest three-bedroom apartment, she said, which was purchased for $1.5 million, not the top of the market at all, carries a monthly mortgage of about $8,000 and a co-op maintenance fee of $8,000 a month. Total cost: $192,000. A summer house in Southampton that cost $4 million, again not the top of the market, carries annual mortgage payments of $240,000.
Now I know New York is expensive. Really. I know that. I believe that. But it is in the absolute worst taste to suggest that it is impossible to live on that much money. So my thought upon reading the article was (cover the ears and eyes of your children), Oh, please, New York Times, shut up.
Now the Consumerist has a response, Cutting Costs: How a CEO Can Live on 500K a Year, which is worth reading. Apparently they had the same sorts of thoughts.