HEY! WALMART IS HIRING…!
I’ve been thinking a lot about job numbers and the Great Recession and wish that we had a number that measure not jobs, but wage hours in the economy. Right now we’re comparing a $25/hour engineering job to an $8/hour Walmart job and calling them equal.
That isn’t helpful.
[Update@0947 But this is:
...a national survey showing that two years after a layoff, "two-thirds of the victims say they are working again. Of those two-thirds, only 40 percent, on average, are making as much as they had in the old job.... The rest are making less, often much less. Out of a hundred laid-off workers, then, 27 are making their old salary again, or more, and 73 are making less, or are not working at all."
A report by McKinsey Global Insitute found that only 36 percent of U.S. workers displaced in the past two decades found jobs at the same or higher pay; 64 percent, or almost two-thirds of the workers displaced, had a decline in income, and 25 percent of those whose income declined had a reduction of 30 percent or more.
From Low-Wage Capitalism by Fred Goldstein.]
From Huffington Post:
Still waiting for a response to the 300 resumés you sent out last month? Bad news: Some companies are ignoring all unemployed applicants.
In a current job posting on The People Place, a job recruiting website for the telecommunications, aerospace/defense and engineering industries, an anonymous electronics company in Angleton, Texas, advertises for a “Quality Engineer.” Qualifications for the job are the usual: computer skills, oral and written communication skills, light to moderate lifting. But red print at the bottom of the ad says, “Client will not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason.”
The tactic is dastardly because what is really going on is an attempt directly damage your competitors. But hey, that’s the way corporations work (for themselves) and not their workers.