I started looking for employment three years ago during my final semester of college and immediately I realized something was dead wrong. But the writing was really on the wall when the career counselor handed me a flyer for a McDonalds job fair. Yes, you read that right. A fucking McDonald's job fair. I thought to myself that if this is what we're offering folks after graduation, we're well and truly screwed.
The counselor told me to keep an open mind, but I knew fully well what she really meant. You know, that my expectations should be LOWER. Not that they weren't low enough already, but this was tantamount to going back to the very thing I sought to get the hell away from to start with. Last I checked, people don't go to an institution of higher learning to have a shot at management at McDonalds....oh, wait, I take that back. People go to Hamburger University to become management at McDonalds.
For the last three years I've worked tirelessly to find employment with interview after interview and rejection after rejection. Of course, since the market is so shitty, employers can get away with hiring someone with a master's degree to do work that someone with an associate's degree would normally do. Or worse, they expect you to do manager-level work for entry-level wages and no hope for benefits because the contract will expire in 3 months.
So where did the opportunities go? To countries that don't give a fuck about human rights, that's where. China. India. Indonesia. The Philippines. Vietnam. South Korea. Mexico. And this was done because of the short-sightedness and abject greed of our corporate overlords and now Millennials are paying the price en masse. If you think it's bad now, just wait until the next generation comes of age.
My father in law tried to lecture me on how not all corporations are evil. I found it hilarious because he'd just been laid off from a managerial position himself. He'd also told me that the CEO at the time had received massive payoffs despite the company doing poorly and the shitty business decision to have designers running projects instead of engineers. And after he told me all this I said that all corporations are evil, it's just a matter of degrees. Just ask them how much profit they want to make and you'll see just how evil they are.
To make things worse, the billionaire plutocracy is now telling us we have to tighten our belts despite the fact that we've done so for almost five straight decades and we've nothing to show for it. They tell us they can't afford to pay us higher wages while spending obscene amounts of cash to buy our government. They lie to us when they say that raising the minimum wage above 10 bucks an hour would make a whole generation unemployable when the reality is that higher wages would mean that mom and dad wouldn't have to work six jobs just to stay afloat.
So what will it take to end this insanity?
See you around,
Homer