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Thanks again for the Christmas cheer, its helping a lot. If you can put a few bucks in my stocking at the Paypal link, I’d appreciate it!
The latest job numbers spell an ominous sign for employers who’ve grown fat and lazy over the Great Recession. If it holds up, corporations that have been in the driver’s seat for years are going to have trouble adjusting back to low unemployment.
NYT — The numbers are these: The 321,000 payroll jobs added represent the best monthly result since January 2012. Revisions to September and October counts add a net 44,000 positions, boosting those months’ results from “solid” to “pretty good.” Over the last three months the nation has added an average of 278,000 jobs a month, the best result since the 2008 recession except for a brief boom caused by census hiring in 2010. But what was warming the hearts of many jaded economy-watchers on Twitter Friday morning were the numbers on wages.
Remember, don’t waste mercy and sympathy on a company, corporations are not alive, the Supreme Court notwithstanding. But if they were, they’d be a spoiled, sociopathic toddler with a big trust fund used to getting everything they demand. Most will stubbornly stick to the same methods they’ve been using for more than five years when it comes to hiring. My goal here is to make that adjustment to normal employment as painful as possible for every last one of them. A few things to watch out for below the fold, especially for you young folks who have never known a normal, healthy economy in your entire working life.
Nod politely but never take the team player bullshit seriously. This isn’t middle-school, there is no team. You are overhead, you’re equipment to be used and run at over capacity until you burn out or get used up, just like a server or a box of staples. If they get more than a year out of you they’ve broken even, two years and a token raise or two, an extra couple of days of PTO, and now you’re an obsolete model or an empty box. Your team is your friends and family, and maybe your dog.
HR is not your friend or your agent. Regardless of their good intentions as human beings, they’re not their to help you. They’re there to help the company in its blind quest to screw you as thoroughly as possible out of every dime and benefit you are legally and ethically entitled to, while staying inside the law. If labors laws changed tomorrow and it was suddenly legal to chain eight year-old slaves to a workstation, HR would be briefed on how to implement the law and deal with starving kids in the workplace.
Temp agencies and contract jobs exist to save the company money at your expense. Don’t buy into the ‘this could turn into a permanent job’ horse shit. If a company wanted to hire full time regular workers, they’d hire full time regular workers. They’re using temps because they don’t want to pay you benefits or offer any shred of job security. Take these jobs as an absolute last resort.
Don’t be lured in by fat bonuses for shitty paying non sales jobs. Properly structured bonuses can be great incentives for salaried workers or execs who significantly affect earnings, who already make a decent living wage and whose base pay covers their base bills. Make no mistake my fellow peon: variable pay, as they like to call it, is not pay, it’s fairy dust, it’s a lone carrot dangling at the end of a long convoluted pole. Most important, it’s a way to defer paying you or squirm out of paying you at all for work you have already done. There are all sorts of clever ways to legally get out of paying you that tiny bonus and still cut huge checks for the higher ups. If you get hurt on the job or qualify for employer sponsored disability insurance, bonus pay will not be used in the calculation of your disability pay. If you get ‘right-sized,’ bonus pay won’t play any role in calculating unemployment payments. If you are separated from service for any reason, odds are you’ll never see one penny of the bonus you had already racked up.
Don’t fall for the ‘ground up’ opportunity that comes with pay and benefits below market value. Because, someday, maybe, the company will go public and you’ll be the next Dellionaire! Few small and medium-sized business make it to the venture capital phase, let alone an IPO. The vast majority of venture capitalists are ruthlessly focused on getting their money back as fast as possible by any means necessary. The odds of you joining a company before a hot IPO, and surviving the ruthless process of cutting every job they can to brighten the books leading up the offering, where you get enough stock to change your life, are on the same order of magnitude as winning the jackpot on a scratch-off lottery ticket. The main difference being, you’ll put in a hell of a lot more time and sweat before finding out your ticket just barely missed the grand prize.
Don’t fall for the “promotion that will look great on your resume” pitch that comes with no significant increase in base pay. This isn’t colonial times, you’re not a silversmith apprentice learning the trade. If you’re offered a promotion it’s only because they need a cog turning in the machine in that spot and they want to get a shiny new one as cheaply as possible. Odds are you’ll be working for someone else in a few years, and if anyone decides to actually check your former employer, the only thing that prior employer is allowed by law to say is your length of service and official reason for leaving. There will be no detailed accolades on how awesome you were to step up for free. Unless you really love the new job, don’t fall for it.
Don’t buy into glibertarian nonsense. You’re not a venture capitalist, you’re labor. Anything that makes labor scarce benefits the laborer. Unemployment insurance, severance pay, welfare, food stamps, Social Security, Obamacare, the Great Plague of London: anything that reduces the labor supply and takes the heat off of finding any job just to stay alive means less workers available for companies to choose from. It’s supply and demand, something your company knows all too well. The lower the supply of labor and the higher the demand, the higher the price, the higher your pay and benefits package.
Outside of a union, your only vestige of bargaining power comes from how badly a company needs workers. Which brings us to our last suggestion: be looking for work outside of your company at all times. Every week put in at least one or two job applications. Your company is looking for your cheaper, younger, healthier replacement 24/7, don’t hesitate for a second to return the favor.
Words of wisdom. There is a reason they erased labor history from the textbooks.
Smacking those rose colored glasses off people’s eyes as they contemplate the roles of capital, management, and labor is always a good start. The American public needs to viscerally understand that the business or business is always, and singularly, maximizing profit. Paying labor, protecting the environment, even providing a product to consumers are all secondary to maximizing profits. If selling poison milk to orphans would gain the highest profit you can bet the business plan would be written and trolled around for investment capital.
Business is powerful beast. Picture a draft horse. If the horse is harnessed and directed useful work can be done. If the same horse gets into the corn you can lose the crop and starve. Business needs to be harnessed and regulated. The historic fact is that every major industry has had to be regulated. Many, like oil and airlines, ruined their own markets and were not able to show reasonable profits until the government stepped in and regulated them. After they were organized and became profitable the memory of the government stepping in to save the day was conveniently forgotten.
I suspect labor will, in time, return to its former strength. I have read a couple of articles, the tone reinforced by the tone of a MD I visited, that even doctors, at one time the height of independent professionalism and completely different from what people consider to be labor, are coming to realize that they are, just like the janitor and ditch diggers, labor. This enlightenment has been the result of changes in medical practice that have moved MDs out of independent practices where they had some control and into medical “groups” where they have little or no control over hours, work conditions, who they treat and how they practice medicine.
If doctors can get it that they are labor there may be reason to hope.
You are so spot on with this. I wish I knew some of this when I just graduated from college and was all starry eyed and naïve – would of done some different career choices instead of staying with Boeing for 13 years (where I was miserable the last 4 year or so). One thing that the young ones have is the internet where the info you summarized is easily distributed. I strongly recommend that those starting their careers look into Glassdoor.com… there you can get to see all the warts of what it’s like at the mid to larger sized corporations.
Oh, and to emphasized, if nothing else, remember THIS from the blog: “You are overhead, you’re equipment to be used and run at over capacity until you burn out or get used up, just like a server or a box of staples. If they get more than a year out of you they’ve broken even, two years and a token raise or two, an extra couple of days of PTO”.