How America turned poverty into a crime by Barbara Ehreneich

How America turned poverty into a crime is an essay by Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch and, most recently, Bright-sided, takes a look at poverty in America in the wake of the meltdown and the changes that have occurred in the past ten years since the publication of Nickel and Dimed.

The Girl's Guide to Homelessness by Brianna Karp

During her homeless year, Brianna Karp chronicled her homeless experience on the blog The Girl's Guide to Homelessness. She was young, educated and according to her own account, had worked for over a decade, even as a teenager, at a variety of jobs that left her with plenty of marketable skills. When she was suddenly laid off from a job that she loved, she was forced to move back in with her parents, though coming back into the household with her abusive mother would not make this a long stay. However, Brianna was resourceful: she was able to use the unexpected inheritance of a trailer and move onto a local Walmart parking lot, find a place to shower and soon a job--though she did remain homeless, she was able to enter a community of homeless activists.

And she also met the man she thought she would marry. A significant portion of the book is devoted to her romance with a man from Scotland who would ultimately abandon her, and in the cruelest of ironies for a homeless activist, abandon her to the elements in the middle of winter. (Yeah, asshole is not quite the word...)

Brianna is remarkably resilient, turning a string of misfortunes into a job, a blog, a book deal and finally finding a stable job, at least at the time of the epilogue, and a place in the homeless activist community.

Caveat emptor: If you have any association with the Jehovah's Witnesses, you may not be happy with Brianna's depiction of the church or their position on several issues, or how she categorizes the group as a "cult"; however, she is basing her description on her experience with the church. I would also like to give a fair warning for the brief depictions of child sexual and physical abuse. These warnings should not scare readers off from the book, especially since I think it is an important book for librarians who have no or limited experience with homelessness, to read, since many homeless people use libraries for places to job search, research and rest, and Brianna's book does put a youthful, educated, female face on homelessness after the recent recession.

Long term unemployed numbers grow (from NPR)

The Business Story of the Day from NPR was the long term unemployed numbers grow outlines some of the issues about long term unemployment and its consequences:

• more college grads are affected; it isn't blue collar workers alone
• employers are skeptical about hiring people who have had a significant gap in their resumes. I wish this one wasn't true.
• are the long term unemployed, who just stop looking, still counted as "unemployed". According to Surviving a Layoff by Lita Epstein, "Some estimate the jobless rate in this country to be closer to 10 percent if one considers the under-employed and those who have given up looking" (p.x).
  

I urge job seekers to fearlessly account for the gap, either on their resume or during their interview, and for HR managers to have some compassion and really listen to them when they explain. You could be next HR person: get some good karma.

How to be a good boss in bad times

Bob Sutton, the author of the No Asshole Rule, as well as the co-author (with Jeffrey Pfeffer) of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense, a book that librarians who love evidence-based practices should eat up with a spoon, has written an article for Harvard Business Review, How to be Good Boss in Bad Times. Because of how HBR works, you will have to pay for his article. To decide if you want to, watch the interview that he participated in on the McKinsey Quarterly.



I was really interested in his explanation of the "toxic tandem" and when he talks about the fall out of layoffs: the first thing that happens is the best people start leaving.

If you are interested in Sutton's work, he does have a blog, Bob Sutton, Work Matters.

Pfizer offers to support some existing prescriptions

Though the news story focuses on Viagra, people who have lost their jobs and have already received a prescription for a Pfizer drug and have been on it for at least 3 months, could receive a sort of supplement from Pfizer allowing them access to the drug for up to a year.

Since the article mentioned Viagra specifically, I was about to get all upset that it didn't cover contraceptives, but if you read farther down, some contraceptives and smoking cessation products are covered under this deal.

There's more about it on the Pfizer website. Offer good in the US only.

Would you wear a sandwich board to get a job?

For six months, Joshua Persky wore a sandwich board in New York and pounded the pavement looking for work. He has landed a new job, though it took 6 months of perseverance--and he took a lot of crap, including a not very flattering shout-out on Wallstrip--when someone saw his sign and the hiring representative read his blog.

Layoff creepers

Bob Sutton, the author of the No Asshole Rule, has a thought-provoking post on his blog about the quality of the workers who will lose their jobs if layoffs occur. Do the innovators get the pink slip--and the slackers, possibly by virtue of tenure, get to stay?

This is not to say that new workers are the brightest apples in the bushel, but that sometimes layoffs mean that organizations lose quality workers--and probably the people that they could least afford to lose in a crisis. Sutton makes a good argument for the timing of layoffs and how, if you must layoff, to give workers enough of a lead to know what will happen, so they can resort to plan B. In addition, he also mentions companies, like Toyota, that invest in training and skills development during a downturn. Remember, he advises, recruiting and training replacement staff, on the upswing, is as significant a cost as keeping workers through the downswing.

But it probably earns more goodwill to retain than to let them funnel down the layoff drain.

Keep the light shining

Keep The Light Shining: 3 Unemployment Survival Lessons From Your Canadian English Teacher

I liked the optimism in this piece, but I can also understand the hesitation of the students. Having encountered the same attitude as an ESL instructor (I can't change, I had more before) I can also understand the writer's frustrations. If you suffer from these obstacles (usually called "barriers to employment") realize that everyone has to climb over them.

Libraries, live--from India?

This article from FUMSI reiterates some of the usual advice--stay visible, save money, talk to people--but one of the things that made my heart stutter: outsourcing library or information jobs to India. It's part of the overall trend: programmer jobs, journalism and reporting, call centres, payroll and healthcare services. Why not librarians, especially in the parts of the field that are (F2F) low touch:

• collection development
• cataloging
• ask-a-question IM services
• website design and maintenance

You wouldn't think that they could pay librarians less for the work they do but some companies may have found a way.

It is about who you know

I came across this article Why Some Companies Retrain Workers and Others Lay Them Off and I thought it would be a simple get mad skillz or get a pink slip article. It's actually, a make friends article.

Peter Cappelli, a professor at Wharton, studied why some employers retrain and others layoff (also called, churning, like a feeling induced by a roller coaster). What he discovered was it was not policies that saved an employee, but relationships: how many they had, how valuable and how much the employer valued the relationship.

What is social capital? It’s a tight network of relationships within a workplace...Because it is an asset that exists between individuals rather than within each individual, social capital may suggest why it could make sense to reinvest in and retain individuals even if their job-specific skills are obsolete: The relationships they maintain with others may create value that extends beyond their ability to perform their current job.

Cappelli is also pretty clear: stopping for a chat on the way to get a coffee is not social capital. Social capital is sharing what is in your head for the betterment of others, giving and getting in return. The less you give, the less you can have. This doesn't mean it is the most important measure--I can have low social capital but still have the power to fire everyone--but I shouldn't give away the most important pieces. And those people know more and share more.

If this argument is true, having fresh skills is important, working for an employer with high social capital very important (for more about corporations and social capital check out Linda McQuaig's All You Can Eat), but if you have noticeable connections to people in an environment that values those connections, you can weather the storm. So serving on a committee--one outside of the library so people can see you--instead of writing another book review, may be in your best interest.

This is also called networking, but I didn't want to scare you.

And finally, service providers will be affected by the layoffs because companies are "externalizing" the cost of retraining. This can include the library. If you have some skills that people need to learn--reading, writing, figuring, word processing--you can certainly find private employment.