200,000 long-term jobless Americans will lose their unemployment checks this week

Many Americans (particularly on ATS) forget that these social, political and economic concerns prevail simultaneously in many other Western nations. In fact to my understanding the nation state progressively ceases to exist all over the world, being replaced by the corporate state. Those who have been well indoctrinated into the survival of the fittest doctrine of corporate culture, would say that foreign outsourcing of manufacturing jobs is just healthy competition in the labor market. But healthy for who or for what?

And when you lose your job due to the demand for increased profit margins by the corporations, how will you feel when you are ordered to train your foreign replacement in the duties of the position you once held or not receive a full redundancy payout by the company?

The Communication Workers Union is concerned more jobs will be lost as Telstra moves operations overseas. About 150 Telstra workers and their supporters held a rally in Melbourne to protest against jobs being lost to nations with cheaper labour costs. Telstra is moving 255 IT jobs to India, and the union believes 90 more will go soon.

Communication union national president, Len Cooper, says Telstra's handling of offshoring is causing great bitterness. "The worst part of it is they are asking the workers to train the Indian workers who are going to facilitate taking their jobs," he said. www.abc.net.au...

and:

Kicked in the teeth: Sacked Westpac workers train their Indian replacements by: Helen Pow From: The Sunday Mail (Qld) January 22, 2012

SACKED Westpac workers are being forced to train up their Indian replacements. The Finance Sector Union says at least 188 employees have been made redundant in a large-scale restructure of the bank's technology and back- office divisions and up to 2000 Westpac jobs could go.

But The Sunday Mail can reveal that before sacked staff leave they are being made to train Indian workers on temporary visas at the bank's Sydney CBD offices. www.topix.com...

Originally posted by randyvs
This OP is full of the same BS, that everyone who is lucky enough to still be working is so full of, thier eyes are brown. Him ha and hough hough then when their job is gone or thier business or thier practice goes under ?
Thier always the ones who scream like lil girls at thier first pajama party. Most people who have worked enough to gain unemployment checks would rather be working. So get off your bounce pony !

Oh yea... If I lose my job, Ill be able to get another one that pays the same amount, if not more, within 1 week... I get emails from recruiters and head hunters every week offering me great opportunities out there, but you're right, I will be screaming like a lil girl... Please dont talk out of your ass, especially knowing that you dont know me...

and because they are No Longer Consiodered UnEmployed....

Øbama's handling of the economy will report that the unemployment rate dropped to 7.9%
thus BS'ing all the doofuses that will vote for the (tobacco smoking/ air polluting) snake.... without thinking

Originally posted by jhn7537

I guess your solution for them is to allow them to just sit back and keep collecting checks, even though the US govt. is going broke....

How about forcing the Education system to either lower or eliminate the cost of higher education during this unprecedented time of financial turmoil.

75% of the problem for 100% of those not qualified is the inability to be properly trained or educated. Instead of spending billions upon billions on unemployment insurance, instead pay off the Colleges and Universities to provide free education to those who would like to receive it (completely ignoring the fact that I believe ALL humans have the right to learn and be qualified for free anyway...it should be a HUMAN right)...

It seems immediately people that think as you do want to assume that the unemployed or underemployed lack some drive...that has not been my experience with people who find themselves in that position.

reply to post by alphabetaone


I agree that everyone deserves a free education K-12, after that, the burden is totally on the person going back to school... Yes it would have been nice to have free college, but its more rewarding knowing that I paid for it myself.

reply to post by RealSpoke


Very True words Real Spoke. You sound pretty intelligent and it would have been a tragedy indeed if you hadn't gotten the chance to move to a better school district and be allowed to grow to your potential. I often wonder too when I see others in less lucky to have been able to move to a better place, what they could have been.

Or what I could have been too if my life's circumstances were different.

Originally posted by SpeakerofTruth
Yeah, the Republicans want to be rid of unemployment benefits, cut medicaid and medicare, ditch welfare, et cetera. Instead of decreasing military spending for their war machine, they'd rather see people here in the U.S do without. Makes a lot of sense doesn't it?

edit on 11-5-2012 by SpeakerofTruth because: (no reason given)

Ya vol! mein commandant!

Work camps. Thats what FDR did right after the depression ended.

reply to post by jhn7537


More rewarding? Hmmmm

Quite honestly, I find my reward in the efficacy that education has provided and applying it....not in my ability to take 15 or 20 years to get myself out from under the mountain of debt accrued by a basic human condition; the desire to know more.

reply to post by Rocketman7


Hi Rocket

Try spelling it correctly, viz. JA WOHL, MEIN KOMMANDANT next time...or take a basic German class before posting.

Danke Schoen.

Originally posted by alphabetaone
reply to post by jhn7537

 

More rewarding? Hmmmm

Quite honestly, I find my reward in the efficacy that education has provided and applying it....not in my ability to take 15 or 20 years to get myself out from under the mountain of debt accrued by a basic human condition; the desire to know more.

It's more rewarding because by paying for my own education, it showed that i cared... If it was free, everyone would do it. SInce it costs a substantial amount of money, not everyone cares enough to do it.....

reply to post by Golden Rule


I opted out of materialism after my divorce. I now just rent a room have roommates in an apartment, am 56 and I work 4 well 3 and a half days a week. I have no bills, except car insurance, and I have all the little toys I could possibly want, within reason. Like an inflatable fishing pontoon boat and every piece of electronic equipment brand new that is made pretty much. Couldn't think of another toy to buy but they were all so cheap from China so I bought everything. New computers everything.

On 15 bucks an hour since I keep my expenses low. Health care is paid in Canada, food is cheap, no grass to cut, 3 day weekends, and freedom. I deliver bread at night for the exercise basically. To stay fit, and to stay fed.

I never achieved this level of happiness when I was making 250,000 per year, and had numerous properties and 4 kids.

It doesn't matter how much you make, you just spend more and still feel insecure about your future. Unless you are wealthy. But even if you were, you would have to jog, to be in as good shape as I am, and you would not be able to eat better, because I am a trained chef also.

You could travel, I could watch youtube. You might get malaria, whereas I might get a draft from the window.

Live cheap, live well, and enjoy life today.

reply to post by TinkerHaus
When I lost my job back in 2009 in (of all states) Illinois I was given 3 months b4 my benefits ended. I got off my ass as soon as I lost my job, found a part time job then found a full time job. 4 bucks an hour less but i was working. Some people just can't stoop IMHO.

reply to post by Rocketman7


Thank you Rocketman7. You seem to have mastered that snaky elusive beast of discontentment. You are right, we desire more and more but whenever a desire is realized the desire horizon shifts away back to the same distance.

Thought I'd throw in my two cents worth. I am not speaking to the "shoulds" or "should-nots" of government programs. But I will speak to the difficulty in finding a job, for those that think 79 weeks is too long.

My husband lost his "secure" job as an architectural CAD drafter due to budget cuts. He collected unemployment while he looked for a new job. He looked in his career path for one year with one interview. Once that year passed, he started looking for anything. Pizza delivery, lawn mowing/landscaping, anything. Once he started doing that, he got a lot more interviews. Unfortunately, he was told he was too old, had made too much money, and was too highly educated for them to hire him.

My highly educated husband is now a security guard at 1/3 of the pay, trying support a family of four on $1700 per month. I help out from home (we have two special-needs kids), and bring another $200 a month to help offset grocery costs. It took him two years to get that job. And since he was "new," he had to start at the bottom, entry-level, at 35 years of age. We lost our entire savings, are now uninsured, and lost our entire retirement to pay for emergency surgery when he was still unemployed. A lifetime of work just gone (combined - I worked full time up until we found out our kids had special needs).

So, while I'm sure that there are folks milking the system, there are folks out there who are hard-working, and simply cannot find a job. My husband was one of them. We still struggle daily to just keep our nose above the edge of the water. But we're treading that water hard, and are sure this isn't the end of the story for us. So please, don't paint everyone with the same brush.

I don't know anybody unemployed the last person I knew asked me listen in on a phone interview with him so I could give him some pointers. I couldn't believe what he was telling the woman he was basically hitting on her trying to get a job. He had been out of work for 2 years and at that point I realized what kind of an idiot he was and the complaints I had about him were true and told him not to come back to the part time position I had been giving him at that point he was a lawsuit waiting to happen

Originally posted by jhn7537


It's more rewarding because by paying for my own education, it showed that i cared... If it was free, everyone would do it. SInce it costs a substantial amount of money, not everyone cares enough to do it.....

That is all well and good, and is a personal opinion; your OWN feelings towards your own education. However, your opinion on it is not tantamount to a good solution for all involved right? The fact remains (your personal feelings aside) that if, as in your words, "everyone would do it", it would catapult them towards eliminating something you decried in the first place.....

Originally posted by jhn7537
I guess your solution for them is to allow them to just sit back and keep collecting checks, even though the US govt. is going broke

... asking the above question

reply to post by sparksfley


I'm very sorry for your situation, its definitely tough when someone is too over qualified to get hired, its actually quite strange when you think about it... I understand that there are unique situations out there like yours, my only real issue I have with unemployment are the people who ARE milking the system. When I begin to think of those people who arent proactively looking for a job it literally fills me with anger, if you are looking for work then I cant question it.... Just curious, is your husband just looking on job boards like career builder, monster, etc.? Or is he using tools like LinkedIn? If he isnt using LinkedIn, I would try to have him network with recruiters and head hunters on there, it truly is a great tool, I'm constantly being bombarded with opportunities...

News isn't good, huh...

Anyhow here's my opinion...

Straight non-tiered unemployment numbers are a very poor way to measure the success of an economy. They can be doctored to the point of being meaningless.

They need something like job numbers vs. income segment vs. cost of living for a given region. And this data should be compiled and presented for public consumption by a non-vested party. Yeah it would be a 3-D 3-axis chart (which could in turn be overlaid on regions on a map), but what it represents would be much more realistic and useful. Particularly when deciding where you should go for a real chance at personal economic success.

The thing is, you can have high employment, but if you have way too many people with master's degrees flipping burgers that means your economy sucks. And if somebody bothered to do the math it would mean economic productivity is in the ####'er. (All the work to get higher education and the cost of the higher education vs the income of the poor paying bottom tier job counts as a major economic loss in my book. Multiply that by the number of people and their purchasing power which is what should drive a healthy economy... Realistically, things currently work out towards a deficit that can't be paid off.)

This globalism stuff really doesn't work too well for the people in its current incarnation. Governments are mostly at fault. Particularly when those who are supposed to be there for the people and representing their interests sell them out in order to take the money and run. The biggest problem is that the market's being heavily played by those who are supposed to regulate it. Nothing to do with capitalism or whatever, more like shysterism and cronyism misconstrued as capitalism which when being honest works out as "crapitalism". That's what needs to be fixed, and there should be stringent accountability put in place for those able to make regulatory decisions.

Or have I not been paying attention while watching what different people are saying and trying to put all those pieces together?

Originally posted by Germanicus

So what happens to these people now? What will they do?

And dont you care?

Americans do care. The problem is,the Government doesn't. They are a number,a statistic. A statistic,once off the Unemployment numbers,that doesn't get tallied if they STOP looking for a job. A statistic,played with political leaders,and President Obama who touts the economy is getting better,under his open arms. We have a failing infrastructure in America. Instead of bailing out big businesses,The United States Government should be bailing out Americans,by putting them back to work . America could fix every road,every sewer,railroads,etc........ It wouldn't be hard,to create a Jobs program like that. No one would complain.Least those who NEED a Job. BTW,just look at the Unemployment rates for those living in the inner city's. Even sadder if you are a Minority.

Originally posted by Germanicus

Personally, I dont have a problem with this at all. Unemployment is supposed to be more of a safety net, not a long term solution.

So what happens to these people now? What will they do?

And dont you care?

Edit- I find the basic lack of empathy in America to be disturbing. And it seems to go beyond a lack of empathy. It seems many Americans delight in the misfortunes of others.

Also,there are no jobs. Your corporate overlords sent them all to China and India. What are these poor people going to do?

edit on 11-5-2012 by Germanicus because: (no reason given)

Edit- Do any other countries in the West have such a terrible cruel welfare system? I have never heard of one.

edit on 11-5-2012 by Germanicus because: (no reason given)

Im sorry but I must say that this whole piece you wrote smells of a hippy attitude to life. Love trees and all that crap.

I can not understand how someone can not get a job that affords them to hold their head up higher than if they collect welfare for the period of 79 WEEKS......come on. I know that most of your jobs are done by children now in 3rd world dumps but there are still plenty of jobs around.

I think it is LAZINESS and the feeling of being too good to do the jobs available.

If you collect welfare for 79 weeks then you need to have a serious word with yourself about your position in life. Because as far as I am concerned your position is that akin to human waste.

I have NO empathy in general let alone for bums who STEAL money from the working populas by way of 79 weeks on welfare.

What are they going to do you ask??? Maybe get a job....or DIE!! take a pick its their choice!