Get a Job, Ya Bums
We’ve all heard the mantra of how the long term unemployed are lazy bums who should “go get a job at McDonalds.”
The wealthy folk who blame the unemployed for their plight also seem to believe that there are unlimited job openings available at the McDonald’s fast food restaurant chain. A number of job seekers in northern Nevada and California recently discovered that there the job openings at the chain are actually finite:
Thousands of job seekers turned out at McDonald’s stores in Nevada and California today as part of a “Hiring Day” event.
McDonald’s plans to hire about 1,000 people across 600 restaurants in the Pacific-Sierra region, which includes Northern Nevada and California.
From the Sacramento Bee:
About 300 applied at Courtney Ristuben’s five McDonald’s locations in Citrus Heights, Fair Oaks and Folsom. There, she saw “people from (age) 16 to folks with families; people with four-year degrees to others with résumés two pages long.”
The scene was repeated at McDonald’s restaurants from Sacramento to Visalia, Reno to the San Francisco Bay Area, with managers describing lines that formed around restaurants and spilled into parking lots, said Julie Wenger, a McDonald’s regional marketing manager.
Apparently even the McDonald’s chain doesn’t have over 15 million job openings.
Tags: Jobs, unemployment
Thank you! The fact that labor markets are so fragmentary allows conservatives to hide behind the notion that the unemployed “could get a job if they really wanted to.”
Of course, “really wanting to” translates into working for lower and lower wages, each man outdoing the other with how dramatically he can lower his own standard of living!
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Usually when people lie on applications, they try to impress. They will claim a college degree when they don’t have one, will say they are a little older, or have more experience than they actually do. NOW to apply for a job you have to deny ANY formal education, ANY job experience, and you may just get that min. wage job!
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To say that all long-term unemployed people ” are lazy bums” is just not so. On a Rush Limbaugh broadcast a few weeks ago, it was said that there are now 180,000 unemployed who just gave up looking for work. Not “just wanting to be lazy bums,” but have just given up because of one factor or another that the employers are using like hiring younger workers over older, more experienced workers because “the younger ones can be paid less than that of the older counterpart” leaving the experienced worker out of luck and frustrated at the current job market. Or jobs that no longer take seniority into concideration or just elimiate it and replace it with “perform or else” tactics..
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Evidently they haven’t done the math. Twelve hundred dollars a month for a one bedroom apartment in California and somehow your supposed to support your family on $7.30 an hour? Gasoline is $3.50 a gallon X 20 gallons= $70.00. One day of labor won’t buy gas for your car!
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Would this form stop blogging about McDonalds jobs in reference to the unamployed? I am sick of this pseudo-righteousness about these types of jobs. Many of the unemployed, especially those in their fifties and sixties, have significant education and skills. And there is no righteousness about saying that people with education and skills should be working at a fast food place or a call center. We need to use the skills of educated people. THe discrimination against women in science has to stop and we have to get women with Ph.D.s and Master’s degrees in science out of the tech writing contract and substitute teaching ghetto and into meaningful work. R&D needs to be greatly expanded. Educated unemployed people could be put to work tutoring children who need academic help, tutoring college students in statistics, and providing enrichment tutoring to gifted students. No, there is NO righteousness about trying to shove everyone into fast food work.
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When are people going to understand that people in their fifties and sixties, and even some younger people, are not able to stand up for long periods of time, but are able to work *in the fields where they have years of experience.* The reason they chose their careers originally was because the jobs matched their abtilities. Trying to shove people into work that doesn;t match their abilities will not work.
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Please excuse the typing mistake in my last comment.
I recently attended a scientific conference. Although it was located in a US city, almost no Americans were present. There were participants from England, France, Canada, Germany, Austria, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Israel and Japan. Europe and Canada are funding a wide variety of basic research initiatives, even those that do not have an immediate commercial or medical application. This puts a large number of people to work in creative and intellectual pursuits (no McDonalds is not righteous employment policy) and supports graduate students. In addition to scientists, it creates jobs for administrative personnel and for clinical personnel. It uplifts the computer skills of the population as more people gain on the job experience with a variety of software packages. The current US philosophy that research is a waste of time unless it produces an immediately useful result is driving unemployment. The last economic stimulus package grossly underfunded university research and most of the NIH money went to Alzheimers, autism and genone science, while the lesser known problems sometimes got nothing.
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