A new Year, an old injustice

Happy New Year!

At midnight the minimum wage went up a few cents in 20 or so states.  While the Federal minimum wage is still at $7.25 most states are within $1 of that figure.  In most cases, federal jobs excluded, the state wage supersedes the Federal. 

In Arizona, for example, the wage rose to $8.05 per hour on New Year's day 2015. 

It almost seems generous until you run the numbers....

The average minimum wage job will not offer full time hours (less than 35) to their workers due to employers unwilling to shoulder the additional burden of offering healthcare, overtime and other benefits afforded fulltime employment.

As such and assuming $7.25/hr Federal minimum wage the "technically" Part Time worker (which could be up to 34 hours) would be grossing $12,818 if they got 34 hours a week and worked 52 weeks of the year. 

After deductions that employee would be well under the current (for 2014) poverty line for a one person household of $11,670.  Even 40 hours would offer no reprieve after deductions for health care premiums and a higher tax rate would effectively lessen take home pay.

In 1985 I could live very well on just under 12 grand.  In 2014 I'm likely on public assistance, rely on emergency rooms for my healthcare and frequent the local food pantry to eat.  

Worse, I have a bevy of new regulations to sift through concerning mandated health insurance that I can't afford anyway.

So when I hear resistance from employers paying less than $9 an hour to their full time employees stating that an increased wage would force an increase in prices I'm literally gobsmacked.

The argument is basically this....

"We need to keep wages low and our workers in abject poverty in order to keep our prices down."

I've long been a proponent of a fair wage for a fair day's work and along with that paying what things really cost. 

But what I'm hearing is little more than institutionalized slavery rationalized by an economy based on consuming instead of value.  It's a society where WalMart is the standard and the advances of the last 100 years of labor law are looked on as an inconvenience perpetuated by evil unions.

We hear that minimum wage jobs are "entry level" and not meant to be permanent but gone are the days where they were the exclusive domain of teenagers looking for gas money.  Parents, senior citizens  and displaced professionals often find themselves competing for them simply because there isn't anything else.

What these employers don't realize is that paying a slave wage breeds slave economies that can no longer afford  their wares. 

The snake is eating itself...

These jobs are the last bastion of self-sufficiency for workers without any other opportunity.    

There's no further argument to be made when the opposition's rebuttal is grounded in inequity.  It's the same argument that led to the Southern states walking out of congress in 1861.  That being that the Southern economy could not survive without slave labor.

How is this argument any different other than its scope?  In this case an entire nation instead of a portion of it.

I can't accept the ridiculous or the unjust...enough said...

Don't go to work

I've always believed that the work you do should matter to you.  If you're just plodding along day after day counting the hours till the weekend then frankly you're just wasting your and everyone else's time.

I know it's not always possible to "follow your bliss" but life's too short to only enjoy the weekends.

After over 20 years in the field I've come to the realization that the closest I can come to cubicle dwelling bliss is to either run the IT department or just blithely take my marching orders at its lowest rung.

Anything else just has me spinning my wheels.

So while my credentials include jobs in system administration, support and  project management not to mention creating a successful IT consulting business, my dreams of sitting in the big chair are about as likely as a winning lottery ticket.

So as I scan the job boards and the occasional craigslist posting I keep a vigilant eye open for positions that match the other end of my proposed  bliss...

I had thought I found one the other day.  It was a support job that was described as being part roving admin and part helpdesk.  The nice part was that if I had to go  anywhere the company provided the transportation. 

It seemed perfect.  The pay rate was a little low but if I wasn't shouldering the cost of transportation that was a leg up on anything else I'd seen. 

My application had apparently impressed the hiring manager enough for him to schedule a short phone screen.

In the course of the subsequent conversation the manager told me that the job would involve around 80 hours per week at all hours.  The prospective employee was expected to be available round the clock 24/7/365 and work from the office, home and wherever else he/she was required.

Believe it or not I was still considering the position even after I did the math and figured out that I would be making $9.61 per hour before taxes.

But that wasn't what really turned me off to the job. 

It was the realization during the Q & A part of the interview that this company, like many others, was built on making bad decisions.

Decisions like:

• Attempted "Cleaning" of rootkit, malware and virus infections off of PC's instead of reloading from a backup image. 
• Not providing adequate training to your technicians
• Not staying current with technical advances
• Supporting 20 year old servers with no hope of replacement parts
• Installing software that was no longer being supported by the manufacturer
• Not informing the client as to best practices or upgrade options
• Accepting liability for an SLA at a client where meeting that SLA is impossible due to the previously mentioned reasons.

It all amounts to billing for work that isn't really being done and I have a problem with that. 

IT is an uphill battle and if you're not moving forward it won't be long till you're moving the other direction.  It seems that most of the major players disagree, however, as they've built their IT support businesses off of doing what amounts to little more than "busywork"

It's one of the reasons I don't make the money in consulting that many think I should be.  I like to fix the problem once and move on from there.  I'm not one to keep beating a dead horse.  

The client is the boss but I'm being paid to know things they don't.  That's a level of trust that I refuse to betray.  That means that sometimes you have to have an uncomfortable conversation but I'd rather lose a client that wants me to do shoddy work than continue on and sacrifice my own integrity.

We're getting back to my original assertion that your work life should be meaningful and anything less is just a waste of time.

Making money off not doing the job your clients are trusting you to do is the ultimate expression of that and I can't stomach it.

www.sentrytechnical.com

Are you out of your F'ing....

Are you out of your F'ing mind??!

I just read this article and while I admit it is a bit old (March 2010) the premise is utterly preposterous.

Here's the link...Perspective: Keep working (Even if you don't get paid)

The author suggests keeping the same work routine you had before you became unemployed.

This assumes quite a lot such as; the work you were assigned was still relevant ( dubious if you've been downsized) and that you'll develop bad habits if you break your worker bee routine (god forbid you figure out that you'd be better off contracting.)

There's no doubt in my mind that this individual has never had the misfortune of going an indeterminate amount of time without a steady paycheck. Being a science publication it's also obvious that the author has benefitted from working in the public and/or education sector as well (tenure anyone?)

It's natural. When things are going well your mindset is totally different than if you're scraping the bottom of the barrel just to find enough money to keep the lights on and enjoy a hearty meal of ramen noodles for dinner.

There's almost a sense of euphoria among those who've never stared the specter of financial disaster in the face. They just don't understand how things can go wrong often asserting that they would never stoop to such degradation as taking unemployment or letting a credit card account go bad.

I'm unsure of the source of the quote (and I do paraphrase) but someone once said the measure of a man wasn't what they did in good times but how they weathered the hard times.

Yes, by all means do what you can to keep your skills up but this article suggests working for free for the company that canned you. I'm sorry but if you're let go for whatever reason consider those bridges burned. If they valued you you'd still be there. It's been my experience that once you've been escorted to the door there's no longer a desire to see you walk back in through it, even for free.

I could care less what the U.S. Bureau of statistics says about the bad habits of the unemployed. For one thing nobody I know or have ever known (including me) has ever been interviewed by them so I'm suspect of their findings.

The second assertion came shortly after the quote from a supposed hiring manager, "I have no problem hiring the unemployed. But I will not hire people who are not working"

Really? well thank god for that because you sir are not looking for a resource, you're looking for a slave.

I see the perspective of a taskmaster here. Perhaps because I'm someone who's spent most of his career as an independent contractor I have trouble playing devil's advocate in this case. I'm more about the product than procedure to make it which runs contrary to the prevailing 19th century work ethic.

That's the mantra that says no work gets done unless it's closely monitored and controlled.

The reality is that if you can't get work in your field, working for free won't pay the bills and at some point you're likely to end up pushing shopping carts around Home Depot to pay the rent. This isn't unlike the advice given in those outdated self-help books about how to land the perfect job. You know the ones that say to go work as an unpaid intern for a year hoping to get an entry level position. That's fine if someone can afford to support you but that's been a rarity for a couple of decades now.

The other thing that's not addressed is the cost of working. If you continue doing what you did before you got canned you'll soon find that you're going through an awful lot of cash.

Take the work for free at your old employer jazz. 

You still have the costs just to get there. Fuel costs, bus fare, etc. Then there's the costs for unimportant things like lunch, parking fees and dry cleaning. After all, even if you're sadistic ex-employer does take advantage of your "work for free" offer they won't be happy if you show up in shorts and flip flops. 

Let's also not forget that as a non-employee you will no longer have access to company resources like computers or the internet so you'll have to provide your own. That's at least $100 a month outlay tethering a laptop to a smartphone.

I'm suspicious of this entire article and find it almost insulting. What is even more insulting is the fact that it's on a site called, "sciencecareers"

I'm not the flat earth type but this type of advice makes everyone in the discipline look a bit naive.