Fact: It is an employer's market and the system is imperfect. All of us, recruiters, job seekers, hiring managers, small businesses and people who still have jobs are part of the system. Every day people comprise the majority stake holders at any major corporation. The few major shareholders employ every day people to engage activities that affect other every day people.
The middle class has unknowingly been at war with existing power structures for as long as there has been a middle class. When industry needed labor, it encouraged people to become dependent on selling labor in return for food, shelter and medical care. For many years, the United States demonstrated the ideals of Capitalism, becoming an industrial and a technological leader.
Every-day people established labor unions to set fair labor standards. The middle class began to enjoy ‘free time’, buying toys and contraptions to occupy this discretionary time. Consumerism was born. Throughout the invasion of Japanese cars, the introduction of Pac Man, Disco, Heavy Metal and Hip-Hop Music, middle class Americans maintained an illusion of expansion. Credit was available to anyone that ‘could fog a mirror’. When overtime was cut, we financed this lifestyle on credit cards ...until the elite took a major withdrawal of middle class wealth from the financial markets in October of 2008 and credit dried up.
Although ‘Globalization’ has been confused with greedy redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the elite, the idea is to tap locally abundant natural resources and make them available for the good of the entire planet. For example, the mid-western American states can efficiently grow food. If the global system worked for the good of all, farmers would not be paid by the government to refrain from growing food. They would not destroy ‘excess crop’. What can be considered ‘excess crop’ when there are millions of starving people, some in shadow towns like Detroit?
Globalization was promoted as the wave of the future, as agents of the elite manipulated legislation to enabled giant corporations to reduce the American labor force. American plants closed to reopen in countries with abusive labor protection laws and minimal environmental protection. Corporations market themselves as saviors, raising the living standard and bringing hope to developing nations. At first glance, it looks like a good thing, to improve lives in impoverished countries. However, raising the standard of living in one country by lowering another, results in zero net benefit; or worse.
Especially because so many American people can not find living wages, now is the time to come together and demand Industry be held accountable for greed, deception and fraud, government execute the public agenda and to empower ourselves against the abuses causing this economic meltdown. Individual power is limited. The current social systems serve to divide and conquer every-day people into socially contrived ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’ camps, limiting cooperation and therefore, perceived power to affect change. In other words, it is in the best interest of wealthy players to maintain status quo and the best way to do that is to convince everyone else that there is nothing they can do about it.
When every-day people experience injustice, 99.99% of the time, the injustice is perpetrated by another every day person working in fear, hoping to maintain a means to buy food, shelter and medicine. One person may be a collection agent and the other a laid off auto worker, but they are both one, in a sea of masses, playing adversarial roles within the fabricated social structure, designed to benefit the obscenely rich; 2% of the people who own 98% of all wealth. It is in the interest of Big-Business to manage a fear-based society, by withholding life-sustaining necessities and to foster a divisive social structure.
It is a scary time. It is important to acknowledge fears, strengthen personal and professional networks and change the way we think about employment. Employment is selling time in return for the privilege of life, also referred to as ‘Wage-Slavery’. Big-Business wants us to feel desperate, telling us we have no choice. Don’t believe it.
Every day people can negotiate, learn to value their own time and talents and refuse to participate in systemic corruption. That means recognizing that every business exploits human and natural resources to profit. Exploit means to earn more dollars from the resource than it costs. This is reasonable and in fact, necessary in any sort of Capitalistic or trade-based society. In order for it to work for the good of everyone, employees must earn enough money to live a balanced life.
Refusal to participate in systemic corruption applies to personal decisions about minimum standards for employment. Employees often think of the Corporation as the only player setting standards, failing to accept responsibility for their own choices. When every day people feel squeezed to accept unreasonable terms, they are in victim consciousness; desperation. To reclaim personal power, answer the question ‘Do you work to live or live to work? Unless people are passionate about work, they work to live. Life requires sufficient income and time off to enjoy life. Refrain from making employment decisions that do not provide for the means to enjoy life.
Refuse full time work that will not provide for a reasonable life style, demands 60+ hours a week with no additional compensation or requires 38 hours a week under ‘part time’ status (no benefits). Working full time for less than enough to survive increases stress levels by adding a lousy job to continued financial challenges. It also reduces time for job searches, family and pursuing passions that may provide for long term financial stability.
Part-time work can be better than no work. It might lead to full time or facilitate finding better work. However, specifically because employers do not pay benefits to part time employees, part-time employees have added costs - vacation pay, sick pay, health care... For example, if reasonable income for full-time work is 40k, an appropriate part-time income might be: 40k + 2 weeks paid time off, 10 sick days, $500 a month for health insurance, divided by 2 for a 20 hour/week job. Accepting work for less than is fair and reasonable fulfills Corporate Interests of reducing just about everyone’s standard of living.
Practically no one is paid to stop corruption and fraud. The only reasonably way to fight against corruption is to refuse to participate and take action to correct injustice. If that means earning less money than through unscrupulous and ruthless means, so be it. Every decision every person makes in every-day activities contributes to the problem or the solution.
If actions are taken out of fear, they contribute to the problem. If they are taken out of love, they contribute to the solution. Fear-based actions include standard ‘fight-or-flight’ responses as well as subtle actions; with well thought rationale, having roots in unconscious programming. Actions based in love include standard and subtle implications too. Although ‘love’ has many meanings, for the purpose of this discussion, it refers to unconditional love often associated with spirituality.
For example, many people pursue professions based on the model ‘find out what they are buying and sell it to them’. It is a perfectly rational model until the intentional manipulation of consumers is factored in and we realize people will buy what ever enough advertising, marketing, promotion and lobbying yield convinces them they need, and that it will change based on the agenda of businesses with the most money.
I propose and live by a different model that says ‘If you have a passion within your heart, there is someone that needs you to express it’. That means hobbies can become a primary source of income. Let the magnitude of that sink in. While it is not always a means to address an immediate need, there is always a way to make a living doing what we love. Love-based decisions move us toward what we want, whereas fear-based decisions move us away from what we don’t want. Because love expands and fear contracts, we become more than we were when acting out of love and less of our true selves in fear.
Rational factors, such as consumer demand, competitors, barriers to entry, expected return on investment and investment recuperation period are all important considerations. They are measurable, coming in all sorts of charts, graphs with any number of text-book theories. Unfortunately, information is often intentionally manipulated, like recent global-warming statistics, rendering it deceptive. At best, rational factors demonstrate historical results from measured indicators. Rationale can not verify proper weight given to intuition, predict synchronicity or rectify thousands of years mass-programming that work is not supposed to be fun. With the current speed of intellectual progress, history can not predict the magnitude of human potential for an unprecedented consciousness evolution of every day people.
Regardless of man’s ability to measure, every action we take matters, regardless of apparent results. These seemingly insignificant actions form a collective of other right-action and it makes a difference. One voice is drowned out by the loud clanks of a machine called status quo. But a chorus of voices persistently singing harmoniously to a new song can draw a crowd. When a crowd gets big enough, the fields of injustice are trampled, making room for a new crop. Society needs to plant new seeds.
Make your voice heard by contacting those claiming to be ‘public servants’ with views, opinions, concerns and demands. Here is a link to facilitate contact: https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml. Speak or write with authority. Government works for the people, even if the system is compromised. Call the White House switch board at 202-456-1414 and leave a passionate message to the President.
Research concerns. Read about history not found in school books. Write letters to editors, news stations; comment on articles and in blogs. Join causes that match your beliefs. Refrain from subscribing to ‘group think’; also know as ‘herd mentality’. Network with like minds. Build vocational relationships. Sharpen critical thinking skills. Ask tough questions. Refuse to accept lame excuses and unnecessarily complicated explanations. If you don’t understand, know it is intentionally planned. Ask again. Confront abusers directly, with compassion. Stand up for your rights and follow your dreams, no matter how futile it feels.
Don’t entrust your fate to unemployment predictions or your livelihood on the whim of an employer. Use employment as a means to your ends and do something you enjoy as you develop your hobby into a career. Negotiate fair terms and give employers a little more than agreed. Think about the affect your actions have on other every day people at work, in social groups and in your personal decisions. Be loyal first to yourself, knowing with certainty fair employment provides for a balanced life.
Acknowledge fear and its derivatives doubt, anxiety and confusion without judgment. Fear in its most basic state is a natural signal that action is required. Don’t ignore or cover it up. Discover it. Personal introspection, development and acting on faith leads to empowered, right-action. But the road to survival in the 21st Century job market isn’t straight. In addition to the curves of a normal scenic route, expect U-turns due to construction.
In order to survive the 21st Century job market, every day people need to do extraordinary things. It begins with a personal inventory of skills and talents. Knowing ones self and personal passion is an on-going project. Anything within a person’s soul demanding expression is something others require. Packaging and marketing takes time, effort and defiant persistence.
Go back to school, follow your passion and stop trusting big business. Stop trusting government. Stop thinking you are informed because you watch the Corporate-owned news. Stop believing you can't do anything to improve your life. Take your unemployment as an opportunity to open your own business, go to school or become socially active.
This is a ‘make-or-break moment’ in human history. The ‘powers that be’ have been and want to continue to be in control. If the middle class hadn’t taken such a blow with the market crash, wage reductions and unemployment, after decades of wealth-reduction, the elite would have had a better chance to slowly bleed the masses to death without anyone noticing. So let’s make this time the proverbial ‘rope’ by which systemic greed and deception ‘hangs it’. Learn to recognize this period of uncertainty as a wake-up call, when every day people do extraordinary things, have confidence in yourself and fulfill your dreams.
The middle class has unknowingly been at war with existing power structures for as long as there has been a middle class. When industry needed labor, it encouraged people to become dependent on selling labor in return for food, shelter and medical care. For many years, the United States demonstrated the ideals of Capitalism, becoming an industrial and a technological leader.
Every-day people established labor unions to set fair labor standards. The middle class began to enjoy ‘free time’, buying toys and contraptions to occupy this discretionary time. Consumerism was born. Throughout the invasion of Japanese cars, the introduction of Pac Man, Disco, Heavy Metal and Hip-Hop Music, middle class Americans maintained an illusion of expansion. Credit was available to anyone that ‘could fog a mirror’. When overtime was cut, we financed this lifestyle on credit cards ...until the elite took a major withdrawal of middle class wealth from the financial markets in October of 2008 and credit dried up.
Although ‘Globalization’ has been confused with greedy redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the elite, the idea is to tap locally abundant natural resources and make them available for the good of the entire planet. For example, the mid-western American states can efficiently grow food. If the global system worked for the good of all, farmers would not be paid by the government to refrain from growing food. They would not destroy ‘excess crop’. What can be considered ‘excess crop’ when there are millions of starving people, some in shadow towns like Detroit?
Globalization was promoted as the wave of the future, as agents of the elite manipulated legislation to enabled giant corporations to reduce the American labor force. American plants closed to reopen in countries with abusive labor protection laws and minimal environmental protection. Corporations market themselves as saviors, raising the living standard and bringing hope to developing nations. At first glance, it looks like a good thing, to improve lives in impoverished countries. However, raising the standard of living in one country by lowering another, results in zero net benefit; or worse.
Especially because so many American people can not find living wages, now is the time to come together and demand Industry be held accountable for greed, deception and fraud, government execute the public agenda and to empower ourselves against the abuses causing this economic meltdown. Individual power is limited. The current social systems serve to divide and conquer every-day people into socially contrived ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’ camps, limiting cooperation and therefore, perceived power to affect change. In other words, it is in the best interest of wealthy players to maintain status quo and the best way to do that is to convince everyone else that there is nothing they can do about it.
When every-day people experience injustice, 99.99% of the time, the injustice is perpetrated by another every day person working in fear, hoping to maintain a means to buy food, shelter and medicine. One person may be a collection agent and the other a laid off auto worker, but they are both one, in a sea of masses, playing adversarial roles within the fabricated social structure, designed to benefit the obscenely rich; 2% of the people who own 98% of all wealth. It is in the interest of Big-Business to manage a fear-based society, by withholding life-sustaining necessities and to foster a divisive social structure.
It is a scary time. It is important to acknowledge fears, strengthen personal and professional networks and change the way we think about employment. Employment is selling time in return for the privilege of life, also referred to as ‘Wage-Slavery’. Big-Business wants us to feel desperate, telling us we have no choice. Don’t believe it.
Every day people can negotiate, learn to value their own time and talents and refuse to participate in systemic corruption. That means recognizing that every business exploits human and natural resources to profit. Exploit means to earn more dollars from the resource than it costs. This is reasonable and in fact, necessary in any sort of Capitalistic or trade-based society. In order for it to work for the good of everyone, employees must earn enough money to live a balanced life.
Refusal to participate in systemic corruption applies to personal decisions about minimum standards for employment. Employees often think of the Corporation as the only player setting standards, failing to accept responsibility for their own choices. When every day people feel squeezed to accept unreasonable terms, they are in victim consciousness; desperation. To reclaim personal power, answer the question ‘Do you work to live or live to work? Unless people are passionate about work, they work to live. Life requires sufficient income and time off to enjoy life. Refrain from making employment decisions that do not provide for the means to enjoy life.
Refuse full time work that will not provide for a reasonable life style, demands 60+ hours a week with no additional compensation or requires 38 hours a week under ‘part time’ status (no benefits). Working full time for less than enough to survive increases stress levels by adding a lousy job to continued financial challenges. It also reduces time for job searches, family and pursuing passions that may provide for long term financial stability.
Part-time work can be better than no work. It might lead to full time or facilitate finding better work. However, specifically because employers do not pay benefits to part time employees, part-time employees have added costs - vacation pay, sick pay, health care... For example, if reasonable income for full-time work is 40k, an appropriate part-time income might be: 40k + 2 weeks paid time off, 10 sick days, $500 a month for health insurance, divided by 2 for a 20 hour/week job. Accepting work for less than is fair and reasonable fulfills Corporate Interests of reducing just about everyone’s standard of living.
Practically no one is paid to stop corruption and fraud. The only reasonably way to fight against corruption is to refuse to participate and take action to correct injustice. If that means earning less money than through unscrupulous and ruthless means, so be it. Every decision every person makes in every-day activities contributes to the problem or the solution.
If actions are taken out of fear, they contribute to the problem. If they are taken out of love, they contribute to the solution. Fear-based actions include standard ‘fight-or-flight’ responses as well as subtle actions; with well thought rationale, having roots in unconscious programming. Actions based in love include standard and subtle implications too. Although ‘love’ has many meanings, for the purpose of this discussion, it refers to unconditional love often associated with spirituality.
For example, many people pursue professions based on the model ‘find out what they are buying and sell it to them’. It is a perfectly rational model until the intentional manipulation of consumers is factored in and we realize people will buy what ever enough advertising, marketing, promotion and lobbying yield convinces them they need, and that it will change based on the agenda of businesses with the most money.
I propose and live by a different model that says ‘If you have a passion within your heart, there is someone that needs you to express it’. That means hobbies can become a primary source of income. Let the magnitude of that sink in. While it is not always a means to address an immediate need, there is always a way to make a living doing what we love. Love-based decisions move us toward what we want, whereas fear-based decisions move us away from what we don’t want. Because love expands and fear contracts, we become more than we were when acting out of love and less of our true selves in fear.
Rational factors, such as consumer demand, competitors, barriers to entry, expected return on investment and investment recuperation period are all important considerations. They are measurable, coming in all sorts of charts, graphs with any number of text-book theories. Unfortunately, information is often intentionally manipulated, like recent global-warming statistics, rendering it deceptive. At best, rational factors demonstrate historical results from measured indicators. Rationale can not verify proper weight given to intuition, predict synchronicity or rectify thousands of years mass-programming that work is not supposed to be fun. With the current speed of intellectual progress, history can not predict the magnitude of human potential for an unprecedented consciousness evolution of every day people.
Regardless of man’s ability to measure, every action we take matters, regardless of apparent results. These seemingly insignificant actions form a collective of other right-action and it makes a difference. One voice is drowned out by the loud clanks of a machine called status quo. But a chorus of voices persistently singing harmoniously to a new song can draw a crowd. When a crowd gets big enough, the fields of injustice are trampled, making room for a new crop. Society needs to plant new seeds.
Make your voice heard by contacting those claiming to be ‘public servants’ with views, opinions, concerns and demands. Here is a link to facilitate contact: https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml. Speak or write with authority. Government works for the people, even if the system is compromised. Call the White House switch board at 202-456-1414 and leave a passionate message to the President.
Research concerns. Read about history not found in school books. Write letters to editors, news stations; comment on articles and in blogs. Join causes that match your beliefs. Refrain from subscribing to ‘group think’; also know as ‘herd mentality’. Network with like minds. Build vocational relationships. Sharpen critical thinking skills. Ask tough questions. Refuse to accept lame excuses and unnecessarily complicated explanations. If you don’t understand, know it is intentionally planned. Ask again. Confront abusers directly, with compassion. Stand up for your rights and follow your dreams, no matter how futile it feels.
Don’t entrust your fate to unemployment predictions or your livelihood on the whim of an employer. Use employment as a means to your ends and do something you enjoy as you develop your hobby into a career. Negotiate fair terms and give employers a little more than agreed. Think about the affect your actions have on other every day people at work, in social groups and in your personal decisions. Be loyal first to yourself, knowing with certainty fair employment provides for a balanced life.
Acknowledge fear and its derivatives doubt, anxiety and confusion without judgment. Fear in its most basic state is a natural signal that action is required. Don’t ignore or cover it up. Discover it. Personal introspection, development and acting on faith leads to empowered, right-action. But the road to survival in the 21st Century job market isn’t straight. In addition to the curves of a normal scenic route, expect U-turns due to construction.
In order to survive the 21st Century job market, every day people need to do extraordinary things. It begins with a personal inventory of skills and talents. Knowing ones self and personal passion is an on-going project. Anything within a person’s soul demanding expression is something others require. Packaging and marketing takes time, effort and defiant persistence.
Go back to school, follow your passion and stop trusting big business. Stop trusting government. Stop thinking you are informed because you watch the Corporate-owned news. Stop believing you can't do anything to improve your life. Take your unemployment as an opportunity to open your own business, go to school or become socially active.
This is a ‘make-or-break moment’ in human history. The ‘powers that be’ have been and want to continue to be in control. If the middle class hadn’t taken such a blow with the market crash, wage reductions and unemployment, after decades of wealth-reduction, the elite would have had a better chance to slowly bleed the masses to death without anyone noticing. So let’s make this time the proverbial ‘rope’ by which systemic greed and deception ‘hangs it’. Learn to recognize this period of uncertainty as a wake-up call, when every day people do extraordinary things, have confidence in yourself and fulfill your dreams.