That’s a great incentive to save while you can. I disagree with you, but we can still be friends, right?
Question for you. Your issue with the temp position is probably a common occurrence, but I’m sure it happens as you stated without being said out loud, but is that not a legitimate concern for the employer who is looking to pay you for a service that they aren’t sure you can provide? If I was hiring someone to work for me, I’d want to be confident in their abilities to perform the assigned tasks. I know there are laws for reasonable accommodations and I’m all for that. But all things equal, the employer is looking at you and another person who actually can’t perform the filing duties without some type of a change in the filing cabinet system, a hydraulic chair that costs a fortune or some other costly accommodation, which do you think would be the most likely hire?
Well, at least you have a positive attitude. Seriously, while everyone else has made some very good critical points deconstructing the OP, a positive attitude can actually can go a surprisingly long way with prospective employers. Nobody wants to hire that guy no one likes that doesn’t do shit.
That’s great news and I’m happy for you and your son. It has got to be a relief after trying so hard. But that’s my point. Your son tried and failed. Then got up and tried again until he succeeded. Sounds like you did a good job raising him and he’s got a good work ethic. He’s not the person I’m talking about. He didn’t give up and go apply for welfare only to stay there in lieu of continuing his job search.
Congrats to you guys. I hear that’s a really decent place to work!
He sure did! But then he was down another person and he (boss) ended up having to do the job himself.
Somebody mentioned above about how employees are treated. I can understand not wanting to do a good job or even caring about showing up if you’re treated like crap. That’s not the case here. We have NEVER told someone that they couldn’t have their needed time off. All they have to do is ask instead of not showing up. So many of them feel they can do whatever they want and are still entitled to a job. I’ve worked here for close to 30 years and still would NEVER EVEN THINK of not letting my boss know if I was leaving early or staying home sick. Work ethic has really taken a tumble.
Big question is, have you gotten that job yet? Because it’s real easy to say “look at all these listings on the job board” but another thing entirely to get and keep that job. It’s like walking through an orchard filled with ripe fruit without a worry in the world, but it’s only when you get really hungry that you realize all the trees are 80 feet tall.
It sucks he had to do the job himself, but I couldn’t stand knowing I’d have to pay that guy anymore money by letting him stay. Employment is not a right. It’s predicated on selling your services for an agreed to compensation. If you don’t hold up your end of the bargain, you have no right to keep receiving compensation.
If that’s the case, I find a way to get the fruit. Maybe I throw something at the fruit. Maybe I build a ladder. Maybe I throw a rope around my waist and shimmy up the tree to get my fruit. Hell, I might even cut down the tree! I tell you what I don’t do. Sit around and bemoan the fact that the fruit is out of reach and die wishing someone had given me the fruit.
I’m three days into the process of finding this part time job. If the first few don’t pan out, I’ll keep on looking. I have no doubts that I will find something, and soon. By the way, just my opinion, but looking on job boards is the easiest and least productive way to look for a job. Go in, talk to people, ask the manager if they’re looking, call them. Do anything that takes courage and puts you in a better position to become a face or a person instead of a random job application. But if people just want to surf job boards, I guess I could see how it would be easy to say it’s someone else’s fault.
I can’t save a damn dime. Being laid off for six years with an ailing elderly mother has left me teetering on bankruptcy.
And your question is precisely my point. You say that “ism’s” as in ageism are not a major impediment to finding employment, but I say you’re fooling yourself. Of course, a company has a legitimate concern that a prospective employee can do the work involved, and may not ask such bold questions about physical limitations because of fears of liability. Therefore, the older candidate doesn’t get hired because of assumed conclusions of his or her physical capability which is not getting hired because of ageism. Case closed. It happens all the time, therefore an “ism” is a major impediment while job searching.
The point is that if you live in an area with a glut of people able to a particular job a job seeker has little to no negotiating power. Period. Yes, you can always discuss a skill, make an argument, but the other side is under no obligation to listen. They might even decide to take someone less skilled because that person will accept a lower wage.
The employers don’t give a fuck about the employees’ convenience or coordinating schedules. They really don’t. A business makes decisions based on their needs, not the employees. Sure, they’re aware of employees having another job, it doesn’t matter and it won’t affect scheduling. If the PT employee can’t make business A’s schedule it doesn’t matter the reason - they’re gone. There will be no consideration that the employee is trying to keep both employer A and employer B happy.
You clearly have not attempted to work two jobs on the lower end of the socio-economic scale these days. Employees are disposable. There’s always another person looking for work who will take over.
Yeah, my current store employs several hearing-impaired people, one with cerebral palsy, another who is mentally slow, and several employees in their 80’s, including one still working full time. That’s great. They’ve also [del]fired[/del] let go several with back problems, knee problems, and wrist problems. Sometimes a disability really is incompatible with a job If you’re lucky an employer will make accommodations but many don’t and some don’t even bother to cover that up.
Just because the US elected a black man as president doesn’t mean prejudice against black people has magically disappeared. It’s real. Likewise, all those other forms of discrimination are real. It makes it harder to find work. That’s a reality. If you’re a white, able-bodied Christian male you might have some difficulties but everyone else has MORE difficulties.
It can be surprisingly hard to get in the door where I work because they don’t discriminate, there’s enormous competition to get in, which means the employer really can pick and choose who they hire and don’t have to negotiate. Because ethics matter to the owners they really do hire in a diverse manner based on capability. Not everyone does that, not everyone is ethical.
Failure to pay people for work done is THEFT. Stealing from people is wrong regardless of whether they here legally or not. Subjecting employees to unsafe working conditions is wrong regardless of whether or not those employees are here legally or illegally.
It really paints you in a bad light that you seem to be OK with abusing people.
…And that’s why I know you’re a white male.
Yes, EVENTUALLY a person will be able to find work, but all those “isms” put a person at a disadvantage and it takes them longer to find work… and meanwhile, they still need to eat and have somewhere to sleep.
The biases really do impact people. It just makes everything harder.
Then add kids into the mix and things really get crazy. As pointed out - who is watching the kids while you work, and how much does that cost?
A single, young, healthy person can find work of some sort, even work multiple jobs, but there are millions of people who don’t fit that description.
Not to be a “Debbie Downer,” but you might want to have your son take a look at this article (and Google “Amazon working conditions”).
If he absolutely has to have a job, it’s fine, but if there’s any chance that there’s something else untapped that he could look into, I’d highly advise him doing so.
You’re in for a shock. If you call or show up at the store and ask to speak to a manager, they will hand you a card with a link to their online application, if you’re lucky. Then they will most likely throw your resume in the trash. Unless you personally know someone who works there, who can vouch for you in person to the hiring manager and bypass the bureaucracy, applying online is the only way. This isn’t the 80s anymore, and “hitting the bricks” is not how you get a job these days.
(Unless you are out in public at 5:00 am and the local lawn care guy needs to hire someone yesterday, as in the other poster’s anecdote, but situations like that are few and far between, and not the basis of an intelligent job search strategy.)
Well, if you haven’t found one, you must not be actively looking. Hence my statement.
After all, jobs are easy to find, as per you. A person who isn’t as employed as they want to be would never be ignorant enough to say something like that.
Do people not realize that managers have actual jobs which take time to complete, and are not in the business of responding to every entitled yahoo who takes a notion to walk in the door demanding to see one?
I realize this will likely fall on deaf ears, but striding into a business as if you have an actual reason to be there just to bother and harass someone into giving you a job is, get this, not a good way to get hired. That kind of “courage” is the courage of all pushy imbeciles, and will be rewarded as such. It states loud and clear that you have no respect for the time of others, and are incapable of following even the simplest rules if they inconvenience you.
WTF do think constitutes the “public teat” these days?
I’ll tell you how it is in my state: once unemployment runs out (and it’s a max of 99 weeks under any circumstance, and right now 26 weeks, or 6 months because the economy is better than the Great Recession) an adult gets NO money from the state. You get THREE months of food stamps. Once that three months is up you have to either
prove you have a job but still need them because you have low pay,
you don’t have a job but you are legitimately looking for work (which might mean reporting to a state office and doing your job search from there so a bureaucrat can witness your efforts) but haven’t found an employer yet, or
are enrolled in some sort of school or training program as a full time student (though how the hell you’re supposed to eat and have a roof over your head in the meanwhile with no income I have no idea).
IF you meet one of the above conditions you get another three months of food stamps. After which you get to do it all over again. One time in the welfare office I overheard the hilarious exchange between a case worker and a prostitute who was attempting to claim her sex work as employment so she could continue to get food stamps. She was getting paid for her efforts, right?
Also, remarkably given this is a Red state, single adults without children can get Medicaid. They still have to pay a percentage of their incomes (minimum $1 per month for people with NO income) but they can at least get medical care.
But you get NOTHING else. Nada. You get food stamps. You get no means to get shelter (the Section 8 lists are closed in this area, you just can’t get one them so no housing assistance). No cash money (so good luck buying soap, deodorant, decent clothes for an interview, etc.). That’s IT. WTF “public teat” is that? You can’t live on that. Period. That’s why I’ve had co-workers living in homeless shelters or sleeping in their cars. There is no more public teat.
Again, you are demonstrating a certain basic ignorance of the issues. Unless you’re living in a state that actually does have some provision for impoverished adults you just are clueless about the current state of affairs.
Wait - if you do have kids there is a small amount of cash available, called TANF, but it has a lifetime maximum of 5 years - meaning if parents of new baby get it, it runs out just about the time the kid is going off to school. No way to extend it. Have anther kid? Sure, there’s a TANF for that kid… but it only covers that kid you’re still left with the older siblings and nothing for them.
Things changed in 1996. There is no more “welfare”. This is why we have entire families living in homeless shelters or tent cities.
No, we don’t.
They aren’t.
The only thing an able-bodied person - and a lot of not-so-able-bodied but not quite totally disabled people - can get is food stamps. And after three months they have to justify getting even that.
Where are you getting this notion that there are poor people living well on welfare (which no longer exists)?
But Og help you if you aren’t a perfect physical specimen. And even if you are, those jobs just aren’t available in my area. My landlord has been a general contractor for 40 years in this area and after two years of not being able to get jobs even sufficient for him to live on he’s starting a new job on Monday as a semi-truck driver - he’s no longer running 40 man crews. He was the business owner and he couldn’t get 40 hours of work a week.
Sure, if you can relocate to Florida or Puerto Rico I’m sure you can find construction jobs (especially if you can also speak some Spanish) but if you’ve got a spouse and/or young children you’re screwed. Said landlord’s brother is a single father - he’s got three kids to care for, has to pay for childcare for when he’s at work, and relocating to another state or a Caribbean island has a lot more obstacles for him than for a single guy with no responsibilities of that nature.
In all seriousness - have you considered something like Uber or Lyft or even something like grocery shopping and delivering? You can set your own hours so you don’t have to worry about the part time job conflicting with your main job. For some people it works out really well. For others… not so much. Look into the “gig economy”, for someone such as yourself it could be a good option.
The problem is that some businesses ONLY want you to use the job board. Going in, in person, and trying to talk to someone might actually work against you, because you’re demonstrating you won’t follow their given directions.
That is, in fact, my employer. If someone comes in following your strategy they will be politely told to apply on line. If they persist on the face-to-face approach they will be ignored and NOT hired because they have demonstrated they can’t follow instructions or company procedures.
So, keep in mind the audience when you’re applying for a job. What works for tying to get into, say, a law firm isn’t going to work for what you’ve called “menial labor”.
I once thought your approach was the best method, too, but after four years struggle the state offered me a job search training program. Three weeks after I started and they straightened me out on the modern job search and market I had my current job, which is currently providing me sufficient income to not only support myself without assistance but also to resume saving for my retirement. I wish I had gotten educated a few years earlier, but that’s water under the bridge.
The difference between you and that training program was that the program didn’t deny real problems. There was frank talk about racism and ageism and how to deal with that during a job search rather than simply denying its existence. There was discussion of how to apply to different sorts of jobs, when to go on line and how, when to go in person and how. These are realities. Don’t deny them. Don’t treat mentioning them as an excuse. For millions of people they are real issues. Far more constructive is discussing how to get a job despite being a less than perfect candidate.
