Thursday, October 13, 2011
Being Employed
I got texts from two friends within two hours of each other that they had been laid off.
I thought about saving this until the weekend, but I wanted to talk about how I feel about things like this.
Being unemployed sucks. It really sucks. Being let go, especially when you've been working hard really hurts. And all those feelings you have about work, about how hard (or not hard) you've been trying come up out of nowhere and attack you when your defenses are down. And all you can do is say, "Well, here's to the future." For some people, that transition into something that is 'the future' is going to be really easy, and they won't spend more than several weeks unemployed.
But more and more people my age are getting laid off, and being unable to re-employ themselves. I should know because it's happened to me. It's not pretty and you feel like an arse throughout the entire process. There are plenty of people in the baby boomer age group that complain when they are laid off because they say young people are taking all their jobs. Haha. Yeah right.
I have a hard time feeling sorry for these people. You've had a life to make yourself a living and savings. You have a nest egg usually and you, baby boomers, and sub-prime mortgages, are the reason people my age can't get employment anywhere. I've seen people 10 years too old to be in junior positions and working them like the next hot intern off the press. In other words, no matter what happens in the next twenty years, my generation is screwed. We don't know it yet, but having followed the labour stats around the world, and it's not pretty. In Spain, youth unemployment, ages 15-24 is 45%. It's higher than Greece, which is 42.9%.
Basically half of Spain's youth are unemployed. And the 'regular' unemployment rate of Spain is 21.3% That means there are about 5 million people unemployed in Spain. Think about that....Canada only has 33.7 million people. If we had that many unemployed, where would we be?? Our unemployment number say that we're at 14 per cent youth unemployment, and the overall unemployment rate is 7%. It's going down, but it doesn't mean people are employed full-time it just means they're employed. People are age are stuck in terminal, part-time or entry level positions.
The real employment stat that no one wants to talk about, but has been featured in the media for over a year, is how many unemployed college and university grads there are...and let me tell you, there are a lot of them. But no one is counting them as a separate group unless it's a university, and they inflate their numbers for marketing purposes. When was the last time Stats Canada ever did anything that helped people ages 25-30 or counted them as a separate group? Because that's my generation, and we've been referred to by Macleans as 'Generation Screwed.'
And I believe it. Other than my friends that have government or bank jobs, I can't think of anyone my age who isn't hopping from ship to sinking ship. Because no one can afford to employ people in my age group. We don't have enough experience, we don't have enough connections, and we don't have enough opportunity. It's a bit of rant, but when will people our age be granted middle class opportunities that were available to the generations before us? And I'm not saying, "Where's my piece of the pie?" I'm saying "Where'd the freaking pie go?"
If and when I ever run a bigger business, I hope I employ plenty of people my age, from my generation, and plenty of people younger than me. I wish more organizations would put effort into hiring younger employees. They're cheaper, they will generally work hard or even harder than more senior employees and they honestly want to get experience. I'm really sick of seeing what has been happening to people I've gone to school with and other friends lose their jobs over economic conditions they can't control. When a friend loses their job, it just makes me really, really sad. Employment was bad in the 90s as well, but this...this is the fault of a bunch of bad decisions and bad debt. I'm fine with both of those things, but when are people older than me going to start making smart decisions for themselves and for their own children instead of complaining that they don't understand why their kids can't find jobs.
Ugh. I could rant about this all day.
Labels:
annoyed,
government,
musings,
rant
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment