Archive for April, 2007

I’m fortunate to be leaving one job and going to another job this summer. After resigning from my current job, I still had 6 months on that job, and I have a three month gap between the two jobs, during which I will be paid by my soon-to-be former employer because of an agreement to spread my salary over the entire year rather than just the academic year. I am fortunate that I will not have a lapse in health benefits or in salary.

However, having been miserable at my current job, things could easily have not worked out so well. Had I wanted to quit but had no other poisition to go to, I could easily have gotten into a poisition of having to take a job with no benefits or had to rely on my husband’s benefits.

I want to unite with other professionals so we have the bargaining power to provide for our own health and retirement benefits without having to stay at jobs we’ve long since outgrown just for the fringe benefits.

Last year, I was let go from my job as a senior C++ developer. The reason given was that “I wasn’t a good fit going forward” — this despite the fact that I had consistently produced results for six years and had just delivered two significant projects in the past year. I guess it was just a coincidence that my replacements were much younger (I was 50 at the time) and more impressionable.

Since, at the same time, I was faced with losing my lease to a condo conversion, and needed to find a new place to live, I accepted a position with a local consulting firm, despite having serious misgivings about the company. After waiting for three months, my first assignment began. I didn’t have high expectations for the assignment, which was presented to me as C++/Perl maintenance programming, but I was hardly prepared for what was to come. The bulk of the work turned out to be making directed modifications to HTML files — to wit — glorified word processing.

I expressed concern to the management of the consulting company about this, since web page development was not my expertise, and in any case, I was being used as a typist! They discussed the issue with the client but, with the exception of some perfunctory platitudes and lame excuses, nothing ever came of it. At no time did I personally confront the client about this. I did the work, successfully (OK, it would have been tough to screw it up!) and the client expressed satisfaction with all of the work I had done and expressed an interest in having me back for a future assignment.

The assignment ended at the end of 2006, and I’ve been “on the bench” ever since. In that time, at the request of the company I have taken, and passed a Microsoft certification test (in an area that was new to me) and have been diligently working to get up to speed in areas where the company has told me they have assignments. They have queried me about one or two assignments that I really did not have the background for, but was willing to try. However, nothing ever came of this.

Today, I received a call from the general manager of the company telling me that they were letting me go because they were concerned that I was “unhappy” with the previous assignment. They also told me that they had received an e-mail from another one of their consultants who had been working at that same client that supposedly said I had a “negative attitude” and expressed “concern” that I was not right for the company. At no time was any of this discussed with me or was I given an opportunity to respond to these specious comments.

The general manager also claimed that I had been rude to her when she came out to discuss the issue I had raised. This is not only an absolute fabrication, she said nothing about it at the time or in the intervening six months! So, in effect, these people had a company spy surreptitiously reporting on me and on the basis of these anonymous (to me anyway) reports I’m being let go without having had an opportunity to respond or tell my side of the story.

Unfortunately, like most Americans, I live in an “at-will” state, which means that absent an obvious violation of laws regarding discrimination, I can be fired for any reason (good or bad) or for no reason at all. The best I can do is threaten them with an age discrimination suit. However, that has little chance of success as I found out last year when I inquired about my previous termination, which was a much stronger case.

I’m not really shocked about how few rights employees actually have and how the law protects malicious behavior by employers. But now, I’m ready to fight back. Employee rights need to be strengthened and the employment relationship made much more equitable if working people are going to have a chance against the corporate jihad against workers.

Hi, Barbara! Your face is on my TV right now, the re-broadcast of your 3/4/07
interview on CSPAN2. I have a lot respect for your criticism of an economic
culture that treats the people who do the work as expendable.

I’m a security analyst at a mid-sized bank, and I see how these same people are
vicitimized by scam artists, both legal and illegal. Ultimately, the legal and
illegal scammers work hand-in-hand. People who are paid too little to afford
even basic necessities are pushed over the economic edge by something as simple
as a $200 car repair without which they will lose their job in a locale with no
reliable public transportation.

They go first to the legal scammers, like the credit card companies that are
just looking for an opportunity to throw them into “default” interest rates as
high as 30%. When their paycheck isn’t enough to make even the minimum payment,
they go to the payday lenders who would once have been arrested as usurers but
have been permitted to charge mind-boggling (and undisclosed) interest rates
easily double that of the worst credit card. In the blink of an eye, the person
is deep in the quicksand of debt, turning over more and more of each paycheck
just to “roll over” loans they have no hope of repaying.

Once they are in this hopeless position, they are vulnerable to the con artists
who congratulate them on some windfall that will at last solve their problems:
“You’ve won a sweepstakes!”–”Your long lost uncle left you an inheritance in
Nigeria!”–whatever the story of the month happens to be. They want to believe,
because it’s the only ray of hope they’ve seen in ages. It’s even easier to
believe when the con artist sends them an official-looking check for several
thousand dollars, with the promise of hundreds of thousands more to come, if
only they’ll send back most of the first check for “taxes”, “fees” or some other
nonsense.

Of course, the money the struggling worker sends away is real. The check they
deposited always, always turns out to be fake, and now they owe my employer, the
bank, more money than they’ll ever be able to repay. We’ll tack on even more
fees just for being overdrawn, and finally close their account. The quicksand
has closed over their head, and they’ll never be seen in the economic mainstream
again.

It all started with a necessary expense that their paycheck couldn’t cover, or
more accurately, with a paycheck too small to cover necessary expenses. Yes,
the scammers, legal and illegal, my employer included, pushed them down into the
quicksand, but it started with an inadequate paycheck that made them vulnerable.
The employer is just one more scam artist.

Maybe someday, you could write a book that addresses these many factors that
contribute to this quicksand of debt, which I am convinced is the biggest threat
to many people’s economic well-being.

I am employed but have been unemployed. I am joining UP after reading “Bait & Switch” to make efforts towards the health insurance reform movement. I would like to help prepare for the possiblity that I may be suddenly unemployed and uninsured. Since I am not currently on the job hunt I have the time to do this.

America was settled for trade opportunities and has had international trade ever since. In the automobile industry partnerships were formed with companies in other countries almost from the beginning. Ford Canada began in 1904, Oakland Motors joined GM in 1909 and so on. These arrangements were made essentially by corporations to expand their markets and also to reduce the duty barriers. Corporations lobbied for easier trade across borders and NAFTA was signed in 1992 and ratified in 1994 which eliminated duties on approximately half of the goods flowing across Canadian and Mexican borders. Ross Perot ran as an Independent presidential candidate in 1992 and he warned us about the sucking sound of jobs going South.

A lot has changed since NAFTA. Many jobs did move to Mexico (textiles, Maytag, etc.) but those jobs have since left Mexico and moved to Asia and are further moving to countries with cheaper labor. Several documentaries have investigated the movement of jobs and have reported on the ever-increasing ratio of original labor costs to selling prices. The players that seem to be the big winners are the corporations and shareholders and the losers are the people working the assembly lines.

Manufacturing in the US used to support a middle-class standard of living. One parent working at GM or Ford used to make a good income and could support their family and send their kids to University. It used to be the goal of parents to have their kids graduate from University and get a better paying job as a professional in one of many fields. Those high-paying manufacturing jobs were the first to move offshore and now even many professional jobs like engineering and radiologists are subject to outsourcing.

International trade like the automobile industry grew to expand markets. Now it is dominated by jobs moving to centers of cheaper labor and cheaper goods coming back to the US, generating a huge trade deficit, and nobody seems to be concerned. Corporations are getting richer and spending more on supporting campaigns and lobbyists and the politicians are not feeling any pain. Our economy is growing and unemployment seems to be stable so the numbers look good. We are aware that 46 million Americans are without healthcare but corporations are beginning to lobby for national healthcare as a way to reduce their manufacturing costs.

Then we have become dependent on other countries for our oil supply and have engaged in war to protect “our national security.”

I think a huge problem is brewing and our country is sliding into 3rd world status. The GINI coefficient (ratio of income disparity) for the US is approaching that of Mexico and our education standing is 17th of industrial nations. Lou Dobbs has been campaigning for the threats to our middle class and the impact of illegal immigration but he doesn’t seem to get much attention. Conservative ideology is dominant in this country, making it unpopular to propose that government should do anything to interfere with the economy; private industry will solve all of these issues. But, similar to a century ago, private industry alone is having a negative effect on this country.

With our technology and transportation, corporations have little allegiance to nationhood. It is now very easy for them to move manufacturing to the lowest cost centers and move their headquarters to countries with lowest taxes. They are in their heyday were they can focus on making money and don’t even have to have their own police to control their workers like they did 100 years ago. But who is looking out for the people?

We need an industrial policy but what should this consist of? Conventional wisdom is that protectionism has negative consequences and we also do not want, from a moral perspective, to impede other countries from increasing their standard of living. However, I am not convinced that some elements of protectionism isn’t warranted. I visited Bermuda several years ago and I was struck with how prosperous the island was, particularly compared to other tourist islands in the Caribbean, and I found out that they had a strong “Bermuda first” policy (eg.s foreigners had to pay a very high tax to buy property on the island, foreigners who wanted to work in Bermuda had to go through a labor certification annually).

FDR and his economists came to the conclusion that, in a time of stagnation, public spending was needed to give a boost to the economy. I would suggest that in our current condition, public investment is justified to spur growth of middle-class jobs but it’s difficult to select exactly what to invest in. Back in the 1960s we invested in the space program and we’ve learned a lot and developed new technologies. While the impact on our economy may not be quantifiable, the decision to go into space has been accepted.

Here are some elements of what an American Industrial Policy should contain:

- At a high level it should develop and exploit our human capital.
- We need to work with private industry to form a better partnership. For example, our education programs are already developed to prepare students for employment. The automobile industry is lobbying for national healthcare as a means to reduce their production costs. However, this partnership needs to go in both directions and skipping this country to avoid US taxes is not being a good corporate citizen.
- We desperately need green energy technologies and private industry has come up with windmills, ethanol, methanol, etc.
- We also need to look at what technologies and manufacturing we need from a national security perspective. While we might decide to continue to import, we should, at a minimum, develop the technology necessary such that we could resume production of those products.

After graduating from a top university, everyone kept telling me how I had so many opportunities opened to me. My wife and I tried to do everything right after graduation. We moved to a cheaper city, got a small mortgage, and got jobs.

And we were meeting expenses, paying off school credit and mortgage early, and saving some money. All of this by carefully living a frugal lifestyle. The housing inflation destroyed this. Suddenly, our real estate taxes rose over 20% each year since 2003.

At the same time, health insurance became more and more expensive. Yet our income remained static due to the recession. We suddenly found ourselves in the red, and through no fault of our own.

There really isn’t a choice for moving away since cheap places don’t have jobs available, and places with jobs are expensive. Ironically, our house is still one of the most affordable solutions in the area. And also ironic is that but for a few thousand dollars more, we would be in the black. Yet those few thousand dollars more are very elusive to obtain.

The following article is from the Palo Alto Daily News:

The economic stability of Silicon Valley’s working and middle class is worse now than during the post-dot-com recession, and the future looks grim unless action is taken, according to a report released Thursday.

The study, by the San Jose-based nonprofit Working Partnerships USA, painted a dire picture of the hardships of living in Santa Clara County even as the economy is said to be recovering.

“Without question, working families in the region went through tough times in that recession,” Louise Auerhahn, the nonprofit’s associate policy director, said in a conference call with reporters.

But, she said, “the economic problems facing Silicon Valley residents didn’t end with end of the recession.”

The report, titled “Life in the Valley Economy 2007,” analyzed data from a variety of sources, comparing the year 2000 to 2005. It points to rising health care costs, stagnant wages, high cost of living and job insecurity, among other difficulties of living in the area.

Taken separately, any of those factors would present a challenge to families, Auerhahn said. But combined, they form a “perfect storm of economic woes” that has brought the county’s families to a near-crisis point, she said.

U.S. Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, said in the report’s foreword that it “shines a spotlight on Silicon Valley’s fundamentals, bringing to light deficiencies that should concern us all.”

Among its findings:

_ Median household income fell from $83,370 in 2000 to $74,293 in 2005. When analyzed in income increments of $50,000 per year, the only two groups to see increases over the past five years are households making less than $50,000 annually and households making more than $250,000. The bottom line is that the middle class is shrinking, the study’s authors said.

_ Those declines also come as the median home price has jumped 65 percent since 2000 to $790,000, and as 18.4 percent of homeowners and 23 percent of renters are spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing.

_ Even for those with jobs, healthcare costs have increased: Annual spending on job-based family health coverage has doubled from $1,477 in 2000 to $2,883 in 2006.

_ The public “safety nets” for people who have fallen on hard times have also been hit hard, according to the report. It found that unemployment insurance programs are insufficient, serving only about 40 percent of the people out of work.

“We have to be able to figure out, when there is an information-based economy and a new economy, how do working families survive?” said Phaedra Ellis-Lampkin, executive director for the organization.

To begin tackling the problems, the group recommends bringing people that have “grass-roots energy and professional expertise” together, said Bob Brownstein, policy and research director.

The full report is available on the Web at www.wpusa.org/live.

Fire away!Canned? How to bounce back.

If you’re lucky enough to have a job, you also run the risk of losing it. When actress Annabelle Gurwitch was fired from a play directed by Woody Allen, she told everyone about it — and heard “inspiring and hilarious” stories in return, she says. That led to “Fired!,” a book, a play of staged readings and now a documentary of the same name, airing on Showtime through April 24.

Here, Gurwitch and Norma Gaffin, a résumé expert at career website Monster.com, offer some survival tips:

Anticipate your dismissal. Watch for signs you’re about to be let go, and polish up your résumé. Bad omens: your job being advertised, avoidance by co-workers, a call from human resources. “They’re not calling to ask if you want an Aeron chair,” Gurwitch says.

Embrace the situation. You’re not alone, so don’t be embarrassed to talk about it. Gurwitch also advises making a voodoo effigy of your ex-boss. “It’s cathartic and not illegal — unless you leave it on his front door,” she says.

Choose referrals carefully. If you’re on good terms with your ex-boss, ask what he or she would say if a potential employer called. “If it’s all bad, then ask someone else for a referral,” Gaffin says.

List the job on your résumé. Include start and end dates, but not that you were fired, Gaffin says. “Use the interview to explain why you left.”

Spend your time between jobs wisely. “If you were laid off because of limited knowledge, then make up for it,” Gaffin says. “In interviews you can say, ‘I have taken these classes and won’t repeat the same mistakes.’”