Top Reasons Not to Have a Job

Comments

September 24, 2007 at 6:39 pm

(1) Joan Pederson says:

Thanks for using “Reasons Not to Have a Job” in your headline instead of the Census’s “Reasons for Not Working” and “Reasons People Do Not Work.” Even though the data specifically address paid jobs, and the footnotes identify some of the reasons for not having a paid job as involvment in unpaid work, the author of the report routinely uses “work” as a synonym for “hold a paid job.” It seems unlikely that this person has ever done the very real and difficult work of caring full-time for family members or others who are young and/or sick. (Students: You work too, but those whose full-time care is needed work even harder.)

October 6, 2007 at 8:58 pm

(2) Robert M. Cerello says:

Let’s look at Matt’s list. Do you see something missing from it?
Taking care of children or others – 26%
Chronic illness or disability – 25%
Retired – 13.7% (note that these are people under 64)
Going to school – 9.6%
Unable to find work – 7.9%
Not interested in working – 5.3% (who is?!)
Other – 4.3%
On layoff – 3.5%
Temporary illness or injury – 3.2%
Pregnancy/childbirth – 1.5%

Let’s add up what we might call the “major causes” why folks don’t have a job–
Illness/Injury; Childbirth etc; Layoff; School; Retired; Taking Care of Children or others; Chronic Illness of Disability. Total from the List: 79%

The Job Related Reasons:
Not Interested in working
Unable to find Work
On Layoff
Other
These total 21%.

But, unless, they are included in this list, we have several other causes that would skew I assert the entire study completely.

Let me suggest them now:
1. Incarceration/Mental Illness
2. Closings, Job reductions, Cutbacks
3. Deliberate Discrimination, Bigotry, Faulty Management, Bad Judgment at the Top
4. Failure of Corporate Tsars to Create Jobs
5. Failure of Congress to Regulate Job Market
6. refusal of Financial Tsars to Back Good Men/Ideas

The 51% of those unemployed through having to care for someone or through chronic disability or ijury is shocking and ridiculous statistic, I suggest. The statistic actually argues a obvious truth–we do not have, for whatever reason, a paid help system in place for those needing daytime help by caretakers.
And also, we have a huge number of people whoe talents, whatever they are, and they could be the best, are not being used at all because they are being called “inapplicable” to the present system.

I agree with another commenter who noted that your title was scientific; “Reasons People Do Not Do Paid Work” would have been perfect; but anything other than that or your title”Reasons Not to Have a Job” would have repeated a lie: The question studies a statistic from the standpoint of the potential worker. But it omits the philosophical, regulatory-level and scientific flaws in the US’s gatekeeper-boss tsar over the slaves system fastened oto every field of thought and endeavor, by omitting the causes I listed: the ones due to the “postmodernist misnamagement” of our inflation-ridden statist-topdown incompetent parody of a work marketplace.
Look at justice only as to hiring, promotion, idea-level leadership by the able and not yes-men; look at what inflation due to massive salaries paid to corporate, financial, acadenic, media and bureucratic non-thinking leaders has done to the rest of us–from whom that 70% of the nation’s wealth has been removed–leaving us to pay prices inflated by these egregious big spenders.
Look at the green industries, steam-driven automobiles, legitimate artistic and fictional hero-centered works, the apprenticeship, space-based industries renewable energy and monitoring, inspection, safety assurance jobs that do not exist.
because we have the wrong government.

Thanks Matt for your interestig list. But it isn’t half the story. Instituionalized injustice, being made worse, is working to impoverish the lives of everyone–first among them, all those more competent but being refused work, those unable to find work or not counted in this Republican falsified-cooked figures list (includng those who’ve just given up looking out of sheer frustration), those who are being told they are disabled from the jobs available and those opting to take care of children ofrsomeoe else because they can’t afford a caregiver.

One more additional note. Look at your schooling list.
Despite the needlessness of most college as unnecessary money-wasting, we have to deal with what is physically going on now: Now according to government figures, nearly 45–50% of youth attend a school. Add in those seeking advanced paper chase credentials. Out of 300 million population, counting 1–75 as year classes, those of college age should be 1/2 of 8 million or 4 million, ages 20, 21, plus those in graduate school, or training, say 5–6 million.
As a percentage of your 45 year-classes, who comprise 63% of the entire population–then that total is 180,000. That works out to 3%, not 9.6%.
And what about those wanting to work after 64, and those wanting to work before 20?
I suggest the picture is actually worse than stated in these Republican figures, and also peculiarly skewed as I just proved.

You’ve given us a powerful reason for understanding that an empire of badly governed persons under chronic liars and falsifiers of data lacking in strategic capapability has a very questionable economic future. And no categorical–definition based (science-based) legal marketplaces at all, least of all one in hiring and the attaining of leadership positions.

November 12, 2007 at 1:28 pm

(3) Colin says:

Man, that is ridiculous. Not interested in working. Sheesh, in my day (I am only 13, but it sounds cooler when I say that.) you had to get a job if you wanted to live.