Vocational Rehabilitation

10Oct10

I want to work. I want to work hard and do a job I can excel at. I’m fine with a 55+ hour work week. I’m fine with physical or manual labor. I don’t mind dangerous or difficult labor and even prefer to not have a lot of downtime in my job. I still can’t find a job, because:

 

 

• I’m under the age of 30, so people assume i won’t work hard, despite my employment record showing over 2 years at one job and often taking side/temp jobs.
• I’m not an illegal alien, a teenager, or a soccer mom/retiree working to supplement an existing income, so I want to work for at least minimum wage in my state, which is currently 7.50/hr.
• I have never had health insurance, so I have around $1,000 worth of debt for doctor’s visits on credit cards, from times when I had things like sinus or ear infections. Even though I ALWAYS make my payments on time, even when this means i can’t buy groceries, this means I must be irresponsible, according to the people who run credit checks before employment.
• My state has a law saying that if a person works 40 hours a week at a job, they must receive healthcare benefits, so I have always worked 2 jobs when I could find them because I couldn’t get a 40 hour work week and support myself otherwise, and therefore I have many part-time/temp jobs listed on my resume, and no 40-hour per week jobs. Companies seem to forget that they themselves aren’t hiring for those hours.
• Due to the massive amount of debt that one semester of college got me, the fact that no businesses in my area wanted to hire a college student for fear that they might not always be available to work, and the fact that I have a low tolerance for paying other people to bullshit me… I had to drop out in order to earn enough money to continue my education and keep my apartment.
• I don’t have the money for a car because I don’t have a good job. Most good jobs in my area require you to have a car in order to get to where they are. catch 22 unless mommy and daddy can afford to save you.

Tell me again how it’s my fault I’m unemployed.

I am not completely blameless. I did get a job this summer, which I was told would be “part time.” I was also told it would be 2-4 days per week making $10/hr. If I was capable of showing myself to be a good worker, I might be able to get 4 days a week, which would mean I would not need to collect unemployment, at least for some of those weeks. The job turned out to be 1 day a week most weeks, 2 if I was extremely lucky. Those were always weekend days. I got 2 interviews during that time, and both told me flat out they couldn’t hire me if I gave 2 weeks notice to this job because they needed someone who could work weekends right away. Add to that incompent management who could NOT reliably keep a schedule and tell me when I would be working more than 6 hours ahead of time and the fact that I was getting a ride there from a family member, and you have a job I had no choice but to quit.

When I first got into the workforce, I didn’t understand how much my actions affected others. I called in sick when I wasn’t sick enough, and once didn’t give 2 weeks notice to a part-time job I had to quit because it interfered with my full time job. I am not a perfect person, but I am literally going to therapy right now because of depression from feeling like a worthless person because I’ve been looking for work since APRIL 2009 and have only been able to find temp jobs.

People like me, especially those under 30, born to lower middle class or poor families, are one of the real, overlooked faces of unemployment and recession. I will not lie. There are some young people who don’t get it, don’t work, and expect everything to be easy. I am not one of them. In my experience of working with others in my age group, they tend to have certain characteristics, which I will list now, for the edification of hiring managers, older people who just dislike “kids today” and anyone else interested.

TRAITS COMMON TO YOUNG PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT VERY DEPENDABLE EMPLOYEES:

• Upper middle class background.
• Lives with parents or can rely on them to pay for or help pay for their living expenses. I would say this is the #1 thing. The less someone needs the money a job provides, the less they will take it seriously. I would look closely at avoiding hiring those who can rely on their parents even if they get fired or their hours are cut.
• Smokes a lot of weed. I am actually in favor of legalization, but this is something I’ve noticed. This type are especially likely to be high at work. ANYONE who is using any kind of motor skill or judgement impairing drug at work should be fired, whether or not it’s legal.
• Extremely confident  and makes a very good, “normal,” clean-cut impression with older people. Remember Eddie Haskell from “Leave it to Beaver?” Well, neither do I, but my mom used to describe manipulative young people this way. Someone who comes off as too good to be true and too much like your ideal young person… probably is.

I have not found many young people who behave this way who don’t have those traits, ESPECIALLY the first two. And because of the last trait, I have often seen them kiss up or find other strategies to continue doing things like calling in “sick” every Saturday morning because they were out partying all Friday night, getting high at work or coming in after having a few drinks, standing around chatting to friends while pretending to do work that needs to be done, etc. The good news is that this is not the majority of young people, and most of these young people ARE going to grow out of it in time. But it might be a good idea to add “currently lives with parents who pay for living expenses” to reasons not to hire a person, instead of just assuming all people under the age of 30 are crappy employees.

It might be a good idea to keep some other things in mind, too. If your applicant lives within walking distance of the job they want, and the job doesn’t require a car… is that really a reason to assume they won’t do a good job? I spent over 2 years walking 1.5 miles to work every single day.  If your company runs credit checks, and shows someone’s credit score, think about different ways they could have gotten it. While I can understand that someone who doesn’t make their payments on time is a risk because they are unreliable, someone who is in debt is less likely to quit a job that helps them to make payments. Is a piercing that can be removed while working really worth not hiring someone because of? Is someone who often has a second job at the same time as the first really as unreliable as someone who jumps from one job to another? Most importantly, is it worth jettisoning an entire generation? Have you ever hired or worked with someone who was older and unreliable?

Filed under: Personal, Political   |  Leave a Comment