Expendables - Temp Workers

[SciFi Chick]

I wonder if getting the word out will change anything...

[FZR1KG]

The USA, working on China's employee model...oh wait. I fucked up.
It's China that's using the US model as a basis for employee treatment.

[Sigma_Orionis]

Disgusting.

[Swift]

I'm somewhat surprised that this is a news item. This has been going on for years and is rapidly increasing.

Almost all the people my wife was hiring at her last job were temps. This is certainly true for all the manual labor kinds of jobs.

But white-collar temps are also rapidly increasing. Out of the year plus that my wife worked at that job, she was a temp for about 10 months of it, meaning no benefits, no contribution to 401K, etc. When they finally made her a regular employee, she got no credit (for the benefits) for the time worked. And then, they laid her off a couple of months later.

And it will get a lot worse before it gets better. With the virtual destruction of the unions in this country, there is pretty much no organized effort to oppose this. The standard of living of the lower and middle class in this country are steadily being brought down. I honestly don't think it will stop till the standard of living in places like China and India rise enough to meet it, some place between where we were and they are.

But meanwhile, the rich just keep getting richer and richer. One wonders what such a stratified society will be like, and even if it will be stable.

[Loresinger]

and it's not the only thing that the government creates revisionist history about.

Let's take employment. Employment numbers do NOT take into account people who have fallen off unemployment, those who were fired, those who are disabled and those who have yet to even find a job.

Can you imagine how that would change the figures?

[Swift]

and it's not the only thing that the government creates revisionist history about.

Let's take employment. Employment numbers do NOT take into account people who have fallen off unemployment, those who were fired, those who are disabled and those who have yet to even find a job.

Can you imagine how that would change the figures?

Actually, those numbers are available, I hear them discussed once in a while on business reports (such as on NPR), so they are not a secret. They don't get the press that the "unemployment rate" gets, but they are out there.

Here is the July 5 report from the Labor Department - a couple of seconds of google. It is very long, but I'll quote part of it as an example:

In June, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was essentially unchanged at 4.3 million. These individuals accounted for 36.7 percent of the unemployed. Over the past 12 months, the number of long-term unemployed has declined by 1.0 million. (See table A-12.)

I don't think I would call it "revisionist history". That to me implies someone is going back and rewriting the history books. The info is publicly available.

I actually think the government has little to do with the situation I described in my post; it is more a lack of government action to change the situation, rather than the government causing it (though there are some government actions making it worse, such as various tax laws and anti-union laws, particuarly at the state level).