The Urban Hunter: In Search of the Illusive Job Opening

Looking for employment is probably one of the most dehumanizing and demoralizing endeavors ever. The whole employment system is set up to undermine your worth as a laborer and to make you feel like a beggar rather than a prospective company asset. If you are unfamiliar with the modern employment safari (lucky you!), let me direct your attention to a few aspects that really grind my gears…

1. Pre-Employment Drug Screening: Fucking stupid & invasive practice! I understand the necessity in jobs that involve heavy machinery, aviation, medicine, or law enforcement. But a drug test for a McJob? Or a clerical position? WTF? The only users really caught up by the piss test baloney are the pot heads, since nearly everything else is easily flushed out of the system in a matter of days, and who the fuck wants to go to work stoned? Talk about a buzz kill & a waste of ganja! So, employers attempt to judge your merits as a prospective employee by screening for recreational marijuana use, enjoyed on your own time! Bullshit. I am morally opposed to this practice & frankly, I think it reflects badly on a prospective employer.

 

2. Pre-Employment Personality Assessments: This is the biggest waste of time for all those involved. The idea is that by answering a shit-load of multiple choice questions, an employer can determine the degree to which an applicant has certain traits or dispositions. The main problem is that the “right” answers are so obvious, any dipshit can come out smelling like a perfect candidate. Also, the questions allow for no gray areas in ethical dilemmas, so they don’t accurately reflect any real-life experiences the applicant may face. For example, if the question was “Is it acceptable for an employee to be late for work?”, the obvious answer is “No” but the question doesn’t specify the conditions of acceptable tardiness. In my opinion, these assessments are used to determine whether an applicant can mimic company-approved behavior and buy into the idea that the company is doing your ethically-challenged ass a favor for hiring you. Bullshit. Until I get to dole out employer assessments that will filter out all the deadbeats, the idiots, the perverts, the sexist bastards, and the infrequent raise givers… they can shove this crap down someone else's throat. 

 

3. Pre-Employment Credit Check: I can understand the need for an employer to be aware of a person’s financial situation if the job deals with classified government information or sensitive product development shit that might attract corporate espionage. Otherwise, there is no reason for your boss to need this info. Late utilities payments or maxed out credit cards do not indicate a person is unemployable. Their character and work ethic are not reflected in their credit score. If anything, an employer should be presenting their financial statements and personal tax records to their employees. After all, it is their financial situation & ability to cover payroll costs that would be relevant to employment. 

 

4. Requests for Salary History: Employers like to pretend that salary history helps them determine an applicant’s experience level and value as an employee. Really, they use the information to see how cheaply you’ll work for them. Salary should be based on what the job the employer wants done is worth, quite apart from who you are, what you've done, or what you've been paid before. Then, during the interview, the employer can factor in their assessments about how you would contribute to the success of that job. When an applicant is forced to reveal their salary history, they give up any negotiating leverage they may have had.

 

5. Requests for Salary Requirements: This is a trick to weed out the folks that want more money than the company is willing to pay. It is also used to highlight those applicants willing to work for dog-shit wages. Once again, wages and salaries should be determined by the company, based on the position’s importance to the employer. They should not be based on what the employer thinks they can get away with on a case-by-case basis. That allows bosses to pay men & women different wages for the same job, thus keeping us at the same 75 cents to a dollar ratio that our grandmothers were bitching about back in the day. It lets employers set wages based on age (not experience. I’ve been fucked by this many a time), race, perceived cultural background, or any other trait that is completely unrelated to the position in question. I hate that shit.

 

It’s like this, y’all: The more bullshit hoops the employer makes you jump through, the more likely you are to think you suck. You will rationalize accepting a low salary offer. You will internalize the message that the company is doing you a favor, rather than the other way around. You will over-value the position & under-value your labor, which just makes it easier for an employer to do the same. Behavioral psychologists refer to this phenomenon as "cognitive dissonance”.

On that note, I’ll leave you with a few thoughts from people much smarter than myself…

 

“All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.”    --- Aristotle

 

“When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him ‘Whose?’ “        --- Don Marquis

 

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”    ----- Abraham Lincoln

 

“If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.”      ------ Lane Kirkland

 

“One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts.”    ------ Molly Ivins

 

“The incognito of lower class employment is an effective cloak for any dagger one might wish to hide. These are those who we do not think of, look at, talk to, yet these are those who have made vast differences and shaped the world, at least their part of it, immensely.”   --- Margaret Cho

Independence Day 2009

Gals like me use this holiday to reflect on our nation’s history and, for one day out of the year, acknowledge the shit that makes us proud to be American. Normally, I am waist deep in criticisms, critiques, and commentary about what we are doing wrong & what we have done wrong in the past. That’s my shtick. It’s also my constitutionally guaranteed right, I might add. But, in commemoration of the Bitch Slap Heard ‘Round the World (you might call it the Declaration of Independence), here’s my

LIST OF AMERICAN ICONS & EVENTS THAT MAKE MY CYNICAL ASS FEEL PATRIOTIC!!

(Against my best judgment)

1. Mother Jones (8/1/1837 – 11/30/1930): She was born Irish, but did wonders for America’s labor movement & was an all-around take-no-shit community organizer in the States, so I claim her as our own. The Senate denounced her as the grandmother of all agitators, to which Jones responded that she wished to live long enough to be the great-grandmother of all agitators! Mother Jones was known as the ‘Miners Angel’ for her steadfast support of labor & union rights, even when her position wasn’t in step with union leaders. If there were a strike, she’d be there to help organize, to motivate, or to rabble-rouse as she saw fit. Railway workers, coal miners, textile mill workers, streetcar workers, immigrant workers, child laborers; wherever there were workers being exploited by their employers, Mother Jones made it a point to show up & start some shit. This sweet, harmless looking, elderly lady could garner a whole lot of publicity for strikes and union struggles that would otherwise be ignored by the media & the public at large. Jones used this to push labor issues on to the forefront of political discussion and force politicians to address the concerns of America’s workers. That is my kind of American woman, folks.

 

 

2. WTO Protests in Seattle, Washington in November, 1999: I was in the Emerald City nearly a year after the chaos of those protests for a marijuana legalization rally and the cops still weren’t fucking with people, in fear of a reprise! The massive outburst of public aggression, referred to as The Battle of Seattle, was a response to the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference of 1999. Basically, the WTO is an international club for multinational corporations that supervises world trade, essentially making wealthy nations stay that way and keeping poorer countries in terminal poverty. A crowd of more than 40,000 people convened in downtown Seattle to protest the conference. Participants included labor unions, student activists, religious organizations, anarchists, feminists, environmentalists, human rights activists, farmers, miners, fishermen, and folks from slews of other occupations and ideological backgrounds. They raged for five days, facing the brute force of the National Guard, and managed to shut down the opening ceremonies, canceled the closing ceremonies, prevented President Bill Clinton from addressing the conference, and focused the American media on police brutality and corporate domination (subjects often glossed over or labeled “fringe”). That’s how you do dissent, people!

 

 

3. Elizabeth Caty Stanton (11/12/1815 – 10/26/1902) and her Declaration of Sentiments: Stanton was an abolitionist, an activist, a suffragette, and a bad ass in an era when those labels were anything but cool. Her Sentiments were ratified by the first women’s rights conference in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848, thus kicking off the first organized women’s rights movement in the United States. She was so ahead of her time (and apparently, ahead of our time too) because she advocated for not only suffrage, but equality in divorce law, parental and custody rights, property rights, income and employment rights, birth control, and the overall economic health of the family unit. All with seven children and a husband on her plate! At her wedding, the story goes, Elizabeth Cady refused to promise to "obey" her husband in the vows, later writing "I obstinately refused to obey one with whom I supposed I was entering into an equal relation”. Get it, Girl! And Thanks.  

 

4. Russell Long: It’s his birthday today & I miss that drunk S.O.B. My life is lonelier without his daily phone calls, however perv-y the conversation or unintelligible the message may have been.