Showing posts with label employment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label employment. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 03, 2015

Raising the Minimum Wage


I recently started a poll at Google+ asking "what if every minimum wage worker had an extra $7 per hour to spend?" It sparked a discussion about costs of doing business, inflation and potential reduction in employment.

I decided to collect some articles about it and I was not really surprised where the line was drawn on opinions and research "findings."

If you ever wanted to know which media source was liberal or conservative, looking up their opinions about raising the minimum wage is a glaring test.

Thursday, June 11, 2015

The Convenient Politically Fuzzy Economics of Government Agencies

Data at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reveals that the legal definition of full-time appears to have been surreptitiously reduced to 35 hours for the benefit of making economic statistics conveniently, politically appealing. By lowering the bar of what is considered "full-time" to 35 hours, the BLS could easily report a higher percentage of alleged "full-time" employment.
Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey page: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat08.htm

According to Wikipedia, "the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not define full-time employment or part-time employment," However, according to People's World: "On October 24, 1940, the 40 hour work week went into effect under the FLSA. The new law had been signed by President Roosevelt in 1938."

My generation grew up with the assumption that full-time was 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday. At least until 1979 when the war on Unions and deregulation gained momentum. See these articles:

The Number of Salaried Workers Guaranteed Overtime Pay Has Plummeted Since 1979

The expanding role of temporary help services from 1990 to 2008, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Tian Luo, Amar Mann, and Richard Holden; August 2010


There Are A Lot Of Part-Time Workers In Post-Financial Crisis America, Business Insider, Doug Shourt, Advisor Perspectives; November 10, 2014 -- http://www.businessinsider.com/ratio-of-part-time-employed-remains-substantially-higher-than-the-pre-recession-level-2014-11


Why The 40-Hour Workweek Is Dying, Forbes, Jayson DeMers; May 15, 2015 -- http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2015/05/15/why-the-40-hour-workweek-is-dying/


The Full-Time Job Is Dead, BackChannel, Kevin Maney; June 4, 2015 -- https://medium.com/backchannel/the-full-time-job-is-dead-b9528bda1c87


Saturday, March 31, 2012

Illinois State Common Sense


I just successfully renewed my Permanent Employee Registration Card (PERC) with the state of Illinois. I have no disciplinary issues that get in the way.

The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation requires that anyone with a Permanent Employee Registration Card (PERC) be honest and truthful about their professional practices. One should answer truthfully that one is not delinquent on child support payments or defaulted on state education loans. Does this mean that one's license gets renewed if one truthfully says they are delinquent on child support or defaulted on state education loans. One might think so.

It makes common sense that if someone with a PERC was dishonest and stated on their application that they did not default on a state school loan or were not delinquent on their child support payments, they would be disciplined for dishonesty in some other way besides refusing to renew their PERC so they could go back to work earning the money necessary to continue paying off their school loan or catching up on delinquent child support payments, right?

Apparently not. Not only does the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation refuse renewal on PERCs for being dishonest, but the department refuses applicants the cards necessary to actually earn the money to make right that which was wrong, and on top of that, the refusal of PERCs cuts revenue to the state of Illinois by $45 per applicant. This compounds the economic loss in terms of tax revenues generated down the line.

While I was at the website I browsed around at some of the articles and found an interesting report on recent disciplinary actions against card carrying members.

http://www.idfpr.com/Forms/DISCPLN/1202_dis.pdf

Thursday, June 09, 2011

Firing Fodder

I've been working a minimum-wage part-time job for over a year and an opportunity to work at a university recently presented itself.

I applied for the opportunity to take the civil service exam and qualified, that is, to take the test.

If I pass the test, I must still go through the interview process. There are probably still more stages of qualification that increase the chances of employment disqualification.

But this time may be different. There may be a glimmer of hope for living-wage employment, but something seems wrong. In this economy, with the state so deep in debt and borrowing money to pay its bills, why is the university hiring again?

The same position was open two years ago. What happened to that employee? There are any number of positive as well as negative reasons why the position reopened, but there is one that is particularly heinous called "firing fodder."

Most places of employment have a first-in-first-out hiring policy. Usually these shops are union organized, but it's fast becoming popular with non-union employers as well.

In March of 2008 I was working a minimum wage temp job when I jumped at an opportunity to work for $11 per hour as an Audiovisual Services technician, what I was professionally trained to do.

I changed jobs and was laid-off eight months later. I was out of work for over a year during the recession. If I kept my minimum-wage job, I would have been working steadily as a temp in the health field.

So now I have this seemingly golden opportunity that under better economic circumstances would lead me down the path of prosperity, home ownership and comfortable retirement.

But chances are this time I will be picked up after quitting another job, then dumped again so it will look on paper like "sacrifices" were made, when really the whole point of hiring fodder is to preserve the next few people up on the totem pole.

I'm not sure I should follow through this time because the economy is getting worse again and I need at least the job I have.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

The corruption of employment tests.

Sometimes you must take a test for employment, such as when applying at Central Management Services for a job working for the state of Illinois, or perhaps a union job such as Engineering Operators Local 965, or to enter the MBA program at the University of Illinois.

You may become extremely frustrated while taking the multiple choice portion of those tests because there are inserted within the tests, questions with more than one correct answer.

How many times did you wish that you could explain your answer in a little box under the question?

How many times did you want to raise your hand for the proctor and explain that more than one answer can be correct on a particular question?

And finally, did you ever wonder why you consistently just barely arrived within a couple of answers of passing the test, but not quite?

With computerized tests, it's very easy to code a subroutine to automatically pick the answer other than that which you chose, as the correct answer, if your name in the test database wasn't part of another secret database, thereby giving you a non-passing grade, keeping you from getting a job, joining a union, or an elite fraternal organization.

Perhaps the other secret database is a collection of names of certain families, political contributors, certain organizations or associations, etc.

One way to determine if a test is corrupt is to file a Freedom of Information Act request for the tests results of, say, all the employees of the Department of Human Services, or the Department of Transportation, students in the MBA program, union members, etc. and check for the following:

1. Look for all test questions that were graded as correct, but with different answers selected. In other words, if the same question was answered differently by different people, but the question was graded as correct, then you have a guaranteed corrupt question, and the individual was flagged by the computer for a passing grade.

2. Follow the guidelines set by the authors of the book "Freakanomics" and look for patterns in the test questions among all the test-takers who were hired, and the test-takers who were not hired.

How do they try to cover up the corruption? By changing up the test questions under the guise of "preventing cheating." It won't really matter if you select all the tests over a ten year period, because you can easily divide up the tests into subgroups based on the question changes and still get the results.

So, if you must take a test to get a job and you don't pass, but the questions were vague, open to interpretation, and more than one answer could be correct for various reasons, then you probably need bribe money.

The problem in Illinois is that there is little or no fulfillment of Freedom of Information requests.

Friday, February 12, 2010

When employers already have someone in mind.

I saw this first hand, actually it was when I was hired back in 1993. I was an intern, and the boss wanted to hire me, but he told me he was legally obligated to advertise for the position anyway.

He placed an ad in the local newspaper. It kept me on my toes for a month, but my supervisor told me not to worry about it. That's why the newspaper classified employment ads are a complete waste of time.

Serious employers will advertise in more than just the newspaper, they will advertise on college campuses for internships, where there's no shortage of cheap or free labor.

With the Internet it's easy to research whether or not an employer is serious. Check the online job boards to see if the same advertisements are present. You will find that most of them are not present.

The employment classified section of the newspaper is most frequently used as cheap advertising if not used for the obligatory job ad for whom an employer already has someone in mind.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Day 3

It's only been three days since I got the notice. The notice said "immediately." and I was done.

I was told that it was not a performance issue, and I accept that. I'm not unhappy about having all this extra time off around the holidays but I am right now in a position where I must make some crucial decisions.

I tried to build a career on creating multimedia presentations and putting together the technology for those presentations, and it turns out that most of the people who need media technology to help them persuade the public one way or another, are assholes.

I thought about journalism, but the newspapers are crumbling under the weight of the Internet, and I wouldn't know how to get paid for blogging. I have some Google ads on my blogs, but so far they have not paid a penny.

This blog has been floating around in Limbo for quite a while. It even had it's own website at one point, but I let it lapse for lack of activity.

Well now it's back. So, what I'm going to do is create a Google calendar and embed it into this blog. If I receive notices about job fairs or seminars, I'll try to keep the calendar up to date. I may add some other widgets such as Digg which can be quite helpful.