Drive Yourself to Poverty, Work for Use

A true account and there is little more to say. Some would tell me that some job is better than no job, others would applaud me for saying no. I say it is what it is and it is time to move on.

25^th July 2011

Dear Cassi,

 The latest of my job search woes was a growing security guard company. I sent them my resume online and was called in for an interview. I met a man with my own first name. This fellow told me that the amount of time I had spent with my last company was an exceptional reason for them to hire me.

    

I was then called in the next week to become a “Flex Officer” in the Orange county area. As I sat filling out paperwork, I found a page about steeling within the company. It stated that the company had four accounts of theft by security guards in the past year. That would be four accounts they know of indicating that there were at least forty in reality.

    

They asked if I lived anywhere near the job site, and I informed them that I did not. It was when they glazed over that point that I knew something was wrong. I brought up the point for a second time and the operations manager said “You’ll never get a job right next to you.”

    

I was informed that if I wanted this job I had to be willing to drive fifty miles to work every day at a paycheck that would hardly cover keeping my car running.

    

I have always thought that this came from the idea that if a person needs the money they will come to work. It is an idea that fails to take into account what this will do to job performance. Financial problems place a worker under stress. Where as it is true that a worker under stress is less likely to be able to get another job they are more motivated to do so. The stressed worker can put less into their work and is less productive.

People work these jobs because they have little alternative. The need for work holds them like the manacles of a dungeon. So many companies right now are held together by the bad economy that if it ever got better these companies might just disappear.

In the end they referred me to another office but I have not heard back,

Richard Leland Neal