This is something I need to talk about, as this affects me and more than likely affects many people on this website alone.
There is a jobs crisis in the US that at this rate will never be solved. It began back during the housing market crash in 2006 and the following Great Recession, but in certain reports I've read, financial experts are willing to put that as far back as 2001, following the dot-com crash, the September 11 attack, and the flood of corporate scandals that rocked the early 2000s (Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, Worldcom, etc.). If you were between the ages of 16 and 19 in 2006 like I was, then you entered the jobs market at what is widely agreed to be the absolute worst possible time in modern history, and the entire economic and government system blame you squarely for everything going wrong.
Obviously it's a desperate attempt to place the blame on another group the establishment can all agree on because it's what they universally aren't; minorities, the young, and the poor. It's what has always happened in the past whenever there is an economic crisis. The main difference between then and now is a perfect storm of various changes in technologies and mindsets combined with an at best incompetent and at worst exploitative and malicious management that believe they can hold back the tide and refuse to adapt to the rapidly evolving world around them.
Within the past decade, more and more companies want people to apply online to their stores using an ATS (Application Tracking System) that is a buggy 20-year old record-keeping system that was never designed to do the thinking for humans, though that is exactly what has happened. If you've ever dealt with Brassring or Taleo, you know exactly what I'm talking about, and there are entire hate groups dedicated specifically to spiting both of these and others individually. Even for the scummiest, lower than minimum wage job, you have to go through a litany of AI bureaucracy in which there is almost no human involvement to even get your foot in the door to a job interview. Because the ATS was never properly designed, your application has a 75% chance of falling into the black hole of applications the instant you hit the submit button because of the way the ATS rearranges formats and information in order to read them, which they don't properly read even then, and no one knows how they actually work (not even the companies that actually sell the ATS; they're just trying to get companies to buy them and people to use them). Your application can also be automatically deleted for any number of arbitrary reasons, such as not having work experience, but I'll get to that in a minute.
Even if you do win the AI lottery, you have to go to a job interview, which is increasingly being turned into an impersonal list of boilerplate questions that puts a wide gap between you and whoever you are interviewing. Deviating from it in any way will cause the interview to end immediately and your application dumpstered, and even then your responses to the questions (which are almost verbatim copied from the "personality questionnaires" you already had to fill no less than three times in a row because most of the questions in the questionnaires themselves are repeated multiple times) don't even get reviewed by anyone, not even the person who wrote them. Instead, it's fed back into the exact same ATS and recalculated, including all of the possible typos of whoever entered it in. Then maybe you might get the job if you were lucky enough. But not for long.
One of the other crises that is in this perfect storm of the jobs crisis is an increasingly high turnover rate. People don't stay at one job for very long for a multitude of reasons these days. Everyone is always moving on to greener pastures in all echelons of businesses, to the point that anyone working for even two years at a single job is considered a veteran. Companies demand loyalty from their employees, yet are just as willing to sack them for even the smallest of reasons, including not smiling. Retail and service jobs have an average turnover rate of over 100%, and in the fast food industry, it's even higher at 200%. Multiple articles I read have hyped this up as a good thing, but it doesn't bolster much confidence in either shareholders or potential employees if no one is able or wants to stay at your company and only use it as a stepping stone for something better somewhere down the line. No one moves up the ladder; they only switch ladders while staying on the same rung and call that progress. All this high turnover rate means employees have to constantly be retrained for a job they won't stay at, which ends up taking a lot of time away from doing actual work, which hurts business, which hurts profits. It's a cascading effect that can't be seen visually happening in real time and can't be shown to a blustering shout-happy CEO on a line graph, so no one pays attention to it.
And that leads to the next problem: the Catch-22 scenario, and this applies especially to the people in my age bracket. Since the Great Recession, when this new jobs crisis began, the employment mentality began to change. The only way, managements decided, to get around the problem with having to train or retrain new employees that are not going to stick around for long is to get people who already have the experience. The bottom-rung jobs like flipping burgers that the Fox News talking heads like to scream at millennials to get? Those places now demand 3 to 5 years work experience. That phrase is pretty much the universal standard on every job post everywhere, and I can guarantee everyone who reads this journal has seen it at least ten times. So now you have even the most entry of entry level jobs require you to already have work experience that you can't get because you don't have work experience. Younger workers like me can't even enter the labor force because that ladder that people tell you to move up is now cordoned off with a velvet rope and a malfunctioning robot.
And all those ladders that people keep jumping back and forth between are rapidly shrinking in number for various reasons. The most obvious one, of course, is evolving technology. Jobs at your local video rental store don't exist anymore, because the video rental store doesn't exist anymore. Everything is now an online transaction that you can make on your TV at home; we rented Guardians of the Galaxy 2 this weekend without ever having to leave the room, much less the house. Even if you go and rent a physical DVD, you go through some kind of automated service like Redbox and Netflix and never have to even make eye contact with another human being while doing so. It's easier, more efficient, and you don't have to hide your face when you rent Filthy Backdoor Assblasters 13 for the four thousandth time (though who the hell rents porn these days? Pirate it like a normal person).
And this trend of jobs dying to evolving technology will only get more extreme in the upcoming years. There's already plans to automate most food service jobs, coal is quickly dying as an industry as the world moves on to renewable, cleaner, and more efficient sources of energy (not even counting the jobs that have been lost due to automation and technology; a handful of miners can now operate an entire mine on their own, much like a single farmer can completely harvest an entire field with a combine harvester in a single day.).
Automation is the number one jobs killer, not outsourcing. Those jobs lost to technology will not come back, and it's not like the olden days where the stablemaster became the car mechanic. It's more like the stablemaster became the car mechanic, and twenty car mechanics became a robot in an assembly line managed by one supervisor engineer. The jobs have changed, but they've also been given to robots that can perform the job just as good or even better than their human counterparts. As one quote I read years ago put it, "Why hire a worker for $25,000 a year when you can buy a machine to do the same job for a one-time payment of $25,000?" During the 2016 campaign, no one mentioned the jobs that were being lost to automation. It's not as easy or convenient a villain as China or Mexico, and especially the older generations are not exactly privy to the rapidly changing economic climate, and as we're learning the hard way, the government is not inclined to actually solve any problems, but rather maintain a status quo in which their funders get to keep and hoard as much money as possible while changing the laws to make even more.
All this compression of jobs is leading to a labor crisis in which there is considerably less demand for jobs, but a dramatic uptake in people looking to find work. This goes back to the various crashes we've had since the turn of the millennium, starting with the corporate scandals of the early 2000s. Enron was not a tiny mom & pop shop. It was a multi-billion dollar international industry, same with Worldcom and Tyco and Adelphia. When each of these companies went down, the employees on the lower rungs got to suffer as well, losing their pensions and benefits and pretty much everything that was even remotely tied to the company that they spent most of their life building. That continued into the current era with the aftermath of the housing bubble. People who invested into mortgages lost everything during the Great Recession when they found out all of their investments turned out to be a massive lie. People couldn't retire and had to enter the labor force once again to a crashing economy, which combined with all the other factors in this perfect storm, suffocated and continues to suffocate any chances for the next generation to actually get their foot in the door, which again, hurts the economy considerably in the long run. People were not switching ladders at this point so much as they were being kicked down the ladder into everyone just trying to get a handhold.
And just because you get a job doesn't actually mean you'll get those benefits and pensions back. More and more places are trying to minimize expenses by forgoing company benefits, and the ones that still have benefits are only provided to full time employees; that's a requirement by law here in California, at least. At my previous job, the hours were being artificially altered so only a few people in the entire store were actually full time employees, while everyone else was part time while working almost full time hours. That's related to how I was fired; despite being hired for part time, I was given near-full time hours, and then they had me work overtime more often than not (over 50 hours per week) before firing me for reasons they fabricated and couldn't provide evidence for when I challenged them on it. So now you have people who can't even save for retirement because even for the people who do have a job, the wages have stagnated to the point that most people are barely able to save up anything because waves have lagged behind inflation for decades, and increasingly fewer places actually provide benefits.
If all that wasn't enough, here's the worst punchline of all. A lot of those job postings you find are probably fake. Just because a company posts a job opening doesn't actually mean they are actively hiring. This has multiple facets to it. On one hand, the fake job posting is part of a half-assed law that seemed like a good intention to get more companies to hire; by pretending to be "actively recruiting", even if they don't actually hire anyone, even if there isn't an open position, they get a tax break, and there is absolutely no oversight over any of this. You probably already know where this is heading.
The other part is to appease their shareholders. Because the stock market and our breed of capitalism has become a self-devouring beast because of the very few restrictions we put on them, companies also post fake job posts to pretend that they are constantly expanding and looking for newer and better talent, otherwise the shareholders will go into a panic that the company might be on the downturn and crash the world economy with their stupidity and rampant paranoia. Problem is that sacrifice comes to the tune of every desperate college student trying to make a little money. It's like lying to a plunger that he's constantly scoring jackpots, otherwise he'll go berserk and torch the entire casino.
To summarize, we've been facing one economic crisis after another every few years because of economic bubbles and corruption, evolving technologies and automation make entire fields completely obsolete with less jobs actually opening up to fill the vacuum in response, people are losing more benefits and wages because of stagnation and have less purchasing power, further exacerbating the crisis, and no one is doing anything to solve it except make it worse by delegating human judgement to inherently flawed programming never intended or designed to make such decisions, then expecting everyone to play by a new system of rules to get the flawed system to work.
This is not good news to anyone like me who has been spending over a decade trying to find work. And just screaming at people to get a job is like going to the Sahara and screaming for it to just rain. Willpower, hard work, and determination are arbitrary and irrelevant factors in this perfect storm of corrupted and half-assed rules in a shitty jobs climate. No one reads your cover letter, no one wants to even know the names of their own employees, much less the new ones that they have to review for an open position (and why do we need to network with a manager for several years in the vain hope to get a job to flip burgers?), and even if you are fortunate enough to get a job, you probably won't hang onto it for very long. There are simply not enough jobs for everyone, and no solution provided by anyone in power to fix it. Then there's the demand that people start up their own company, which is absolutely ridiculous for people who barely even have two cents to rub together, much less the credit score to take out a loan to fund a new business, much less the expertise or experience in operating or managing a business.
There are a few plans to try and fix the economic and jobs crisis. The first and pretty much the only idea right now is for a universal basic income, where regardless of your financial state, you receive a fixed stipend from the government. The idea has been floated around for a while now, with experiments being done in European countries like Sweden and Scotland with support from CEOs and other big name executives like Richard Branson (Founder of Virgin Group), Elon Musk (Founder of Tesla Motors, PayPal, and SpaceX among others), and Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook). Then of course there's the criticisms from just about everyone else. The first and forement idea is that it will incentivize people to be lazy and not find work, which is only slightly reasonable. This delves into cultural ideologies and influences that have been bred into us since the Baby Boomer era, to be selfish, to take as much as you can and give nothing back, and you're a moral person for doing so. At risk of sounding too much like Andrew Ryan, we as a culture incentivized parasitism decades ago, from our approach to hiring people to exploiting workers to scamming people to crony capitalism, largely coming from the top, and that sort of mentality would be the just desserts of that culture we encouraged.
Here's the wrench in that claim, though. We are in a capitalist economy that encourages buying things, even and especially stupid things. There's a lot of things I would like to buy if I had the money to do so, which is why I'm trying to find a job. Some basic income would be nice, and it would allow me to buy things and stimulate the economy a hell of a lot more than if it was in some billionaire's offshore account. The things highest on my list of priorities are mainly so I can better do my freelance job of providing content to you guys; basically starting up and running my own side business, not just for the extra money, but because I find enjoyment and fulfillment from doing it, even when I am screaming at my Writer's Block. I even somewhat enjoyed my time working at the gas station.
Now, obviously I'm the exception to the rule, and obviously there are going to be people that would prefer to exploit the system, but if you want to minimize that happening, you have to change the culture to inspire ambition in people and push them to not just pursue greatness, but make it, no matter where they end up. If you constantly berate people for pursuing skills and knowledge for its own sake or their personal goals and enlightenments, especially if you don't see where skills overlap, then you are contributing to the parasitic culture where the only skills valued are the ones that make you money in the most binary fashion, a culture where money is not a means to an end, but an end to itself, a culture that led the world to the decaying, ruined, paradoxical state it's in now.
The application system needs to be centralized and simplified. We don't need to waste countless hours trying to find a shitty less than minimum wage job, and there is no damn reason to try and microfilter that pool of applicants. For part time and seasonal work, we need a universal retainer system in which people can be given basic job training and then held in reserve if they're unemployed for whatever odd jobs that they have training for while they are looking for something more permanent. The system needs to be streamlined so people aren't bogged down in endless bureaucracy and can spend that time actually doing work they can be paid for.
Even my idea is a sloppy quick fix, but anything is better than doing nothing, because ten million jobs are not going to just magically pop up out of nowhere to supply the overwhelming demand.
The sheer unadulterated excesses of modern-day casino capitalism are so unbelievably crass and bold-faced that a Socialist had a good chance of winning the election last year. I hear a lot of ignorant race-baiting, but I also hear a lot of hammers hitting a lot of sickles in increasing number. There's a not-insignificant growth of people who would be more than happy to dumpster the entirety of Capitalism with nary a wayward thought, and the people in charge seem largely unaware of this.
Personally, I think we need a more sophisticated system. Capitalism has its advantages here and there, but it's ludicrous that housing, food and medicine exist in the same running for resources as fucking fidget spinners or a texting answering service for horoscopes. Deliver unto Need what is Needed, deliver unto Greed what is Greeded. People want frivolous stuff, and it makes sense to have them do frivolous things to get it. It would also help to untie this idea of 'he who does not work does not eat.' I grew up on a farm and I can tell you that no modern job even comes close to equaling that amount of labor. And furthermore, any human doing that kind of labor with this level of technology is offensive to me.
The sheer unadulterated excesses of modern-day casino capitalism are so unbelievably crass and bold-
I think one of the big reasons why more people are embracing socialism is because, especially for our generation, and especially in the past 15-20 years, we've seen capitalism at its worst and most corrupt for most of our life, much less our adult life. We've seen the economy crash because of the housing bubble, we were sold an ocean lies about how we needed a college education for any job worth having (even though now even the scummiest, lowest rung of jobs are light years beyond the moon), and we now know how artificially inflated things like student loans and healthcare costs actually are, not to mention the private prison system and the antics of professional conmen like Bernie Madoff, Martin Shkreli, Mitt Romney and the Entropy and how very few of them have actually served time for intentionally, willfully, and eagerly destroying people's lives.
Capitalism unfettered and unregulated made the perfect argument against itself, but the old guard expects the new generation to shut up, just accept it, and let people with money and power do whatever they want, damned be the consequences. It's utterly sociopathic. It's the mentality of a father who cheats on his wife three times over, and then comes home to beat her and her children while telling them they need to love him and how good they have it.
Any ideology taken to an extreme quickly and easily turns into a bad thing, but that seems to be the only mindset people are able to think in. People are so addicted to this illusory farce we call freedom that the idea of even the slightest hint of rules or regulations to, for example, stop murderous psychopaths from obtaining weapons makes them want to scream at everyone and everything in the universe. Because they feel it affects them, too, or they might need those weapons in some fantastical future where they fight the army of their own government, or North Korea invades or something.
That irrational, psychotic mentality is what led us to being duped into electing a wannabe dictator.
I think one of the big reasons why more people are embracing socialism is because, especially for ou
