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Employment Quotes

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Employment Quotes

“And no matter how upbeat they are—no matter how ingenious and flexible—the unemployed and underemployed understand that the clock is always ticking in the background. The longer you are unemployed, the less likely you are to find an appropriate job, and entries like “sales associate,” “limo driver,” or “server” do not make an attractive filling for the growing Gap in one’s résumé. At the same time, you are inexorably aging past the peak of occupational attractiveness, which seems to lie somewhere in the midthirties now. Experience is not an advantage; in fact, as Richard Sennett notes of corporate employment, “as a person’s experience accumulates, it loses value.” So once you fall into the low-wage, survival-job trap, there’s a good chance that you will remain there—an unwilling transplant from a more spacious and promising world.”

“Less mutable qualities, like age, may have worked against me too. My résumé revealed only that I was probably over forty. But even that relatively youthful status could have repulsed many potential employers. Business journalist Jill Andresky Fraser warned me that a forty-plus woman was unlikely to be hired except by someone seeking a “motherly secretary,” Katherine Newman, among others, has documented corporate age discrimination, quoting, for example, a Wall Street executive who told her, “Employers think that [if you’re over forty] you can’t think anymore. Over fifty and [they think] you’re burned out.”

“Middle-class Americans, like myself and my fellow seekers, have been raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security. This has never been true of the working class, most of which toils away at wages incommensurate with the effort required. And now, the sociologists agree, it is increasingly untrue of the educated middle class that stocks our corporate bureaucracies.”

“Suppose that the [career] transition zone encouraged free-ranging discussion. What might the topics of conversation be? For a start, people might want to address the question of what is happening in the corporate world today; in particular, why does experience seem to be so little valued and accomplishment so unreliably rewarded? Some may object that corporate world is a vague abstraction, concealing a rich diversity of environments, but it was in common use among my fellow job seekers, who often expressed hopes of escaping from it—into a small business, for example, or what they saw as a more meaningful form of work. In saying that I was searching for a corporate position, I seemed to be moving in the opposite direction from many of my fellow seekers, who often expressed a strong desire to get out.”

“My human coworker sometimes talks about not wanting to work, and then he'll say something quite odd and rather silly. What is it he says, now? There's more to a person than the work they do, or A person is more than just their work? Something like that. But what else could a person be? Where would your food come from? Who would keep you company? How would you get by without work and without your coworkers?”

“The more my thoughts wander the harder it gets- everything feels so disconnected. Me and my work, me and the factory, me and society. There's always something in the way. It's like we're touching, but we are not. What am I doing here? I've been living on this planet for more than twenty years, and I still can't talk properly, can't do anything that a machine can't do better.”

“Psycho-compulsion is therefore not just about instilling people with a so-called correct employability mindset. It is a mechanism for penalising deviation from what it defines as the right set of attitudes and behaviours. ‘What psycho-compulsion therefore attempts to do is silence alternative discourses to the neoliberal myth that you are to blame for your unemployment,’ said Friedli. ‘At the same time, it undermines and erodes alternative frameworks around which people can come together in solidarity to act against the social causes of worklessness.’ In short, psycho-compulsion not only pathologises and punishes a claimant’s dissent, it depoliticises the causes of joblessness (which discourages collective action), and it does so by resuscitating Margaret Thatcher’s earlier myth that unemployment can be reduced to character deficiencies.”

“And Jim couldn't get a job, though he hunted for one — desperately, eagerly, anxiously. Walking from one employment agency to another; spending long hours in the musty agency waiting-rooms, reading old newspapers. Waiting, waiting, waiting to be called up for a job. He would come home shivering from the cold, saying, 'God damn white people anyway. I don't want favors. All I want is a job. Just a job. Don't they know if I know how I'd change the color of my skin?”

“Work is the act of making yourself useful by creating value for a specific group of people. In exchange for our work, we each get paid money which allows us to purchase the work of other people. Work creates a virtuous cycle of value creation, value consumption and value growth.  Therefore, work is economically greater than charity. Because whereas charity is economically one sided, work has a multiplicative value effect. In a sense, the greatest form of charity is the creation of employment for others.”

“The distribution of tasks amongst the various employees follows a simple rule, which is that the duty of the members of each category is to do as much work as they possibly can, so that only a small part of that work need be passed to the category above. This means the clerks are obliged to work without cease from morning to night, whereas senior clerks do so only now and then, the deputies very rarely, and the Registrar almost never.”

“acknowledging the relative and emotive nature of ‘worth’, a fair wage is nothing but an economic and emotional threshold at which an individual no longer worries about immediate financial security. It is the point at which the focus shifts from the pay, to the work itself”

“Human lifetimes are time documented by time, employment is compensated by documented time for work; and the value of life is expensive. No one is wealthy enough to buy time for infinity...so why let them waste yours! #Studypeople who do not value the #expense of life & time...gain old, but common #wisdom. #Studypeople who value the expense of life & time...gain new but uncommon wisdom. Last year will never repeat in your #lifetime, neither will the New Year. Consider how you manage the #destiny #distraction of #timewasters... I reset my #NewYear clock with an alarm to signal the entry of expensive time wasters, so I can kindly show them back to the exit point. People who consciously care to connect their active purpose with others who value share them, are more likely to make most of time's expense, rather than waste time, as if forever could be spared.”