"Anecdote: back in the late 90s I worked with a junior tech person who was fairly competent at systems administration tasks. He had no background in computer science, but with the decent pay of the IT job, decided to join a community college and learn some programming and so on. Was trying to work his way up the ladder. Then the .com bust happened, he lost his job, he couldn’t continue college. For the next year and more he frantically looked for jobs in IT. Went to job fairs. Posted on Monster, HotJobs, contacted recruiters, spread his resume among friends. No luck. Went back to live with his parents. I think for the next year or two he pretty much gave up on finding a job. Eventually he resurfaced in the workforce, but in the service industry working in a restaurant for a fraction of his IT pay. It’s possible he might have landed such a job in the year he abandoned hope of getting an IT job and stopped searching, but I am not sure where the value lies in assigning a distinct number and characterisation to him and those sharing his lot."
Yeah.
One side effect of high unemployment is to shift the discussion about work to a discussion about the virtue of having a job and the moral failure of those who don't manage to get one or, god forbid, don't even want one any more.
Fact is, nobody wants a job. What people really want is to have meaningful work that sustains their society and allows them to grow and mature as human beings. Instead, we get this endless churn about jobs and wind up in the false position of saying that we all want to struggle for exactly those conditions (wage labor) that reproduce the system that is killing us.
Just sayin.
Joanna