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Will Write For Food

by Open-Publishing - Friday 14 December 2007
2 comments

Un/Employment Economy-budget Daveparts

Will Write For Food
By David Glenn Cox

To whom it may concern,

I am looking for gainful employment. I have worked during my life doing painting and wallpapering. Not just throwing paint or slapping paper on walls but real quality work. I have done carpentry, building walls, decks, finishing basements. I have hung acoustical ceilings and doors, installed sinks. I’ve installed appliances and worked both hanging and finishing sheet rock. I’ve operated heavy equipment and done public relations work

For the past twenty-five years I have been in the parts business. I have sold products both inside and outside I have done inventory control and purchasing as well as inventory forecasting. I have worked as a store manager, a service writer, a warranty supervisor and even a delivery driver.

My last two employers account for 23 years of my life so I consider myself to be dependable. I realize that times are tough. But my frustration with those pretending to offer employment is maxing out. A five page application to install granite counter tops and to use my truck to boot. Wage offered $8.00 per hour.

Outside salesman for a uniform company, degree preferred. Wage offered $10.00 to $12.00 with 5 years experience required. Now let me ask you a question? Would you hire someone who went to college four years and can’t find a more challenging position than to be an outside salesman for a uniform company? Not to disparage the position only to make the point that 5 years and you haven’t been promoted or found something better?

Looking on web sites listing ten pages of jobs but that begin to repeat after page three. Or the jobs that don’t pay anything all, the starve while you learn plan. I once had a Real Estate license and discovered it to be a great career if you didn’t need a paycheck for say 3 or 4 months. Ditto, selling insurance a great job if you like long hours that will pay out over years not weeks. Or selling new cars when new car sales are in the toilet, jobs that are open because the people who are doing them now are starving trying to do them.

Then there is just the outright scams, secret shoppers, work from home, not much different than the Emails I receive from foreign ministers banished from their home countries in Africa who need my help to recover their vast fortune. Yes, make millions from home selling the same Chinese products that everyone else sells on E Bay.

From Craig’s List, Millionaire investor needs assistant /gofer. Must be willing to work long hours and must have dependable transportation. The duties include making appointments answering the telephone and light personal errands. Great experience for the right person. Wage offered, nada, zip, zilch this is an internship. The millionaire investor wants you to pick up his dry cleaning in your car
but can’t come off ten bucks an hour? Many of these so-called internships offer college credit, great, learn not to be an idiot.

I realize that there are legitimate internships I had a friend who spent his summers at the University of Chicago classifying fossils. They didn’t advertise the position in the paper or on Craig’s list it was a position that had to be sought out. I recently spoke with an employer that used unpaid volunteers and when a paid opening was available she chose from among those volunteers. I’d like to see someone ask for a raise when you’re hired from among those who will work for free.

But I just want a job, I will do a good days work for a good days pay. I’ll make you a fair bargain, I won’t ride the clock if you won’t try to ride me, I won’t use your truck for my personal business if you won’t use mine for your business without paying me for it. I will work to make you money if you won’t work to make your money by cheating me.

I recently applied to drive a county school bus online, after 9 pages they asked, list 3 references with valid Email addresses only. My parents are dead, my in-laws are in their 70’s and don’t use computers. My brother in-law has a computer but his two teenage sons keep it pretty fouled up. (Be advised, these references will only be emailed once and must respond within 24hrs to be valid) So I went down to the bus shop but never got past the receptionist. “You must apply online, there is no one here who can speak to you about that.” I could easily create three Email accounts but are they looking for honest employees or devious?

The excessively long applications and ridiculously narrowing requirements are devices by which to cull the heard. Our official unemployment figures at 4.5% are in fact a farce, don’t take my word for it look at the help wanted ads for jobs that aren’t jobs at all but indentured service or even you pay them for the privilege.

Driving through Atlanta I see businesses failing by the hundreds maybe the thousands. Businesses not just in humble Powder Springs but in affluent areas as well, construction sites chained off and closed down. Georgia according to the experts is in the not good but not too bad category, God help those states in the bad category. States such as Michigan and Ohio with cold winters to endure and California with its higher costs of living.

I’m reminded of the scene from, “The Grapes of Wrath” the migrant workers are on the side of the road when a man in a new car pulls up and asks, “You men looking for work?”

“Sure!” The migrant answers “What’s it pay?” The man in the car looks up at the sky pondering the situation saying, “Can’t rightly say.”

Hardly the good economy that we are told of, hardy 4.5%, hardly good times. More like Tom Joad than Ward Cleaver. Perhaps I should get my sign made and stand at the interstate ramps, “Welcome to the new America!” and on the other side, “Will write for food!”

Forum posts

  • Moving post. But you’re right, neither the economy nor the employment picture are as pretty as the "official" statistics claim. It’s really sad how our "leaders" have encouraged our race to the bottom, in order to appease the elites who own the corporations. Our worship of everything corporate has destroyed our standard of living. Real leaders would have sought to balance the needs of society with those of business instead of bending over backwards to appease business, at the expense of society.

    I don’t see the trend reversing anytime soon. In fact, I see it continuing on its failed course for a while longer, until we’re all destitute and wondering what went wrong. When a lot of people are living on the street and have nothing to lose by protesting loudly, maybe things will start to improve. But it’s sad that things will have to get that bad before improvement can occur. Humans are unbelievably shortsighted sometimes.

    Dave

    • Dave, you still use this uggly word: leader! Leader means "Fuehrer" and you probably didn’t like the Fuehrer - and your US leaders don’t make any difference.

      ...we have to help ourselves.