The Less United States of Kudera: employment

Showing posts with label employment. Show all posts

Friday, August 1, 2025

taxi time

"Take me home and I'll get the money, he said, and I wondered if I could get the meter over $100. Turns out I could not. I pulled up in front of his house at $96.50, taxi time. You know what happened, of course: he disappeared into his house and the lights went out after about five minutes."

~~ from Rick & Jack in Croatia by Rick Harsch

Friday, August 25, 2023

"For one thing, many people believe that there is still plenty of writing going on in school, that in fact written work is the basis of much of what goes on in the classroom, although the facts on the ground belie it. And there's also a sense, in a technological world, that writing, particularly creative writing, is a kind of soft science, secondary to the quantitative. Parents who have rightly concluded that a college education is a pricey investment in an uncertain future may deride the prospect: 'Poetry? Really? How will that help with getting a job?' Yet one survey of executives showed that, almost universally, they rated writing skills as extremely important, no matter what business they happened to be in, and they were inclined to hire English majors because of that."

~~ from Write for Your Life by Anne Quindlen

Friday, February 5, 2021

ten million

We're only missing ten million jobs.

Saturday, February 8, 2014

jobs

The stock market rallied fiercely the past two days despite a second straight month of mediocre job creation. For the January report, five people left the workforce for every one who gained a job, and the February report suggests a similar pattern, as the number of jobs created fell below expectations even as the unemployment rate was reduced to 6.6%. It's also hard to get a raise these days.

Saturday, February 1, 2014

2014 Adjunct Articles

Sunday, November 3, 2013

united states of contingency

Beyond academia, it's in the news, too, and increasingly common among millennials. (I've no statistics on how the writers of all the latter hyperlink's articles were paid, if in fact it was by "exposure," cold hard direct deposit, or any other means.)

Monday, October 14, 2013

nobel exuberance

"Irrational exuberance" Robert J. Shiller winning the Nobel for Economics is a contrarian indicator that gets us to DOW 25,000 by the end of the current Presidential term, but because the correlation between rising stock prices and jobs growth is far from guaranteed in near-term America, this won't necessarily help most of us.

(This is not investment advice or a recommendation to lose money so as to indulge in freedom as an expression of "nothin' left to lose"; furthermore, it should not be read as a "tell" indicating a suicidal impulse on the part of the author or any recommendation to readers to commit such. You're welcome to go ask Alice and get back to me on all this.)

Monday, September 2, 2013

Labor Dreams

A lot Atticus Books fiction concerns how blue-collar Americans struggle to make ends meet, but I'm sure their newest book, Paper Dreams, has a lot on how folks wielding manual and electronic writing and printing devices have also struggled to stay afloat. You don't have to be Edmund Wilson to know the writing life is suffered more favorably on a wealthy patron or partner's dime.

Anyway, it's Labor Day, and a slither or two of unrefined reflection on my father's own "downturn" in the early nineties is partly what I thought of just now after reading this Counterpunch article that insists these are not good times. Its notable statistics include President Obama's economic approval rating is down to 35 percent, a record 36 percent of all "millennials" (aged 18 to 31) are living at home, and that 936,000 of the 963,000, or 97 percent, of new hires in the past six months report that their new jobs are part-time. And then over at gawker, this cynical breeze through Labor Day's past and present moment appeared.

I must say, though, I attended the Dayton, Ohio County Fair earlier today and saw what appeared to be extremely happy working families, thousands of folks with little polish or pretense easily dropping fifty to a hundred dollars on amusement rides and concessions, and no feeling that we were living in a world of bread lines or worse. Of course, it could well be that the stats above support a less visible malaise.

So happy Labor Day?

You tell me.

Monday, July 22, 2013

pay

Ending on Isaac Sweeney's career progress seemed a bit too beyond the pessimistic pale of this blog, so I thought I'd return to my usual doom and gloom with this alternet piece on privatizing to reduce wages among janitors and cafeteria workers at charter schools.

This common tactic, that leads to downward pressure on wages for all "nonessential personnel," was something I noticed even in the 1990s, and it has always bothered me. Maybe the new healthcare law solves this problem, but for now, for most of my adult life, I've lived in a country where we tolerate food workers without access to healthcare serving school children. You don't have to be a "skilled professional" in any field to see how an illness exacerbated by lack of timely medical treatment could be far more expensive to society once hundreds of kids also become sick.

Although Philly.com posted this video on how absurd it is to use an 80-hour work week to teach employees how to budget money, they were also kind enough to post the good news on wages by using the distorting mean instead of median, so with a straight-faced headline they let us know that the "average American worker" earns $1,000 bucks a week. A good clarifying comment notes that we only have 100 million full-time workers (in a population over 300 million), and the median pay among them is in fact $763. I "googled" to follow that back to its source, the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Somewhere along the surf, I also stumbled upon the fact that within the private sector, one in four makes less than ten dollars an hour, and many more of us live desperately, terrified we could sink back under that modest level (400 bucks for a 40-hour work week before any taxes, housing, food, transportation, or healthcare costs are taken out).

If this is America in recovery. . .

Saturday, April 6, 2013

fewer workers, destroyed food

Working Americans are disappearing, and the food gets sent to the dump.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

student loan debt and net-worth gap by race

There's another study that shows how the gap in net worth grew by race in America; whereas a previous study demonstrated that African Americans own about a nickel for every dollar whites have secured in Roth IRAs, houses, cars, or collectible baseball cards, this one focuses on families and has the net-worth gap rising to $236,500 in 2009. Here's a paragraph from The Washington Post's article on the study:

Despite that progress, the wealth gap between whites and blacks nearly tripled among study participants, going from $85,000 per family in 1985 to $236,500 in 2009. Overall, the median net worth of whites in the study was $265,000 in 2009, compared with $28,500 for blacks. A broader survey done by federal officials has found even larger disparities, with blacks having a nickel of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by the median white family.

Although the article focuses on how real estate and employment opportunities, or lack thereof, have exacerbated this discrepancy, we should also consider that student loans have played a role as well. On the one hand, the one with the positive digits attached to it, so to speak, many more African Americans have been able to attend and graduate from undergrad and graduate schools over the same time period, and it should be recognized that this is largely a positive outcome of making college more "accessible" to everyone.

On the other hand, and yes, I'm not ambidextrous but you've come to expect to hear from this sad soggy fish, because African Americans arrive on campus from disproportionately poorer backgrounds, they are much less likely to be getting help from family and much more likely to require financial assistance to go to college. Despite any "advantage" they may have at the financial aid office, it's almost undoubtedly the case that African Americans are taking on more debt, particularly if we look at debt-to-degree ratio (compare debt by race at equal levels of attainment and not compare, for example, the debt of a white law-school student to a black undergrad).

If you look at the total picture, not just the loan debt of graduates, but all who attend as well as all who fail to graduate, and then include the community colleges and for-profits, you will see a clear picture of how "higher education" as currently practiced in America unfortunately fails to ameliorate the black-white wealth gap and in fact contributes to the widening difference.

(And, yes, I understand how this could seem anomalous, or unlikely, from a reader's perspective if the reader is a white student from financial hardship or supposed American middle-class "affluence," who has been burdened by student-loan debt, while the reader has noticed a black student from similar circumstance, or even wealthier circumstances, come to receive better grant aid from a specific college and even the much cherished fellowship or "free ride.")

Overall, these are my strong suspicions, of course, and not something I've had to time to "study" or write a peer-reviewed article on. As it happens, I was mostly too busy teaching school.

*In 2017, I've seen student debt for an undergraduate degree cited as above $37,000 for an "average"--what I assume to be a mean--and around $31,000 for median debt. Various articles suggest 70% of college graduates hold debt; it's harder to find exact information on debt held by students who do not complete the degree.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

no degree, no job

In my life, we've had roughly five to seven different "recessionary economies," depending on how one counts the downturns, and I remember well the one into which I was graduated and gained my "entry-level experience" in the early nineties.

Once I walked into a retail computer "environment," and inquired about work, and in a brief bit of a conversation a guy my age behind the counter exclaimed in anguish, "It's retail," as if that were the worst kind of work possible and not, as a job hunter could see it, a boon opportunity in lean times, a chance to earn a steady check.

Ten years later, talking about the labor market of the early twenty-first century, 2002 to 2003ish, a family member said simply, "You need a college degree to get any job." And now here's the 2013 version of that statement, one of those articles about how you need a college degree to get a foot in the door (i.e. file clerk). It's worth noting that I'm sure there are millions of exceptions to this, people in the workforce without degrees, and many recent college grads are still starting work for someone who doesn't have the "piece of paper."

And yet the trend, even if not invariably true, is legitimate.

And, of course, it will seem much less apparent the next time we move into a bubble economy where not the only the jobs, but the money itself, appears like low-hanging fruit and even falling from the trees.

This piece from the Philadelphia Inquirer suggests that the current recession is "easing," and yet it also reminds us of how companies find unpaid temporary workers to be an affordable convenience.

What else is new?