Get a Job! (Capitalist and Republican Misconceptions)

by David Sims

I’D LIKE TO LET the air out of some Republican misconceptions about the realities of living under modern capitalism — specifically, what it’s like to be a job-seeker.

One important fact: It costs money to look for work. When you are out of money, then you are also out of opportunity.

Employers also have ancillary agendas with respect to their hirelings that they don’t like to talk about. Let me give an example of that: A middle-aged man, referred by the Employment Office to a print shop owner who’d said he was looking to hire help, arrives at the shop’s address, but he is told by the owner that he isn’t hiring anybody, and there must be some mistake. The next day, the middle-aged man goes back to the Employment Office for another job reference, and the bureaucrat there looks at him funny and says that the print shop owner had called him that morning and said that the middle-aged man had not shown up for work.

Now, obviously, what’s going on is that the print shop owner wanted to hire somebody, but he’d taken one look at the middle-aged man and decided that he wasn’t the one he wanted. And to cover his butt with the employment office, the print shop owner told a lie that deflected the blame from him to the unwanted applicant.

So the middle-aged man gets another reference, this time as a copy editor for a small-time advertising company, such as The Waycross Shopper (just to pull a name out of a hat). He goes to the company’s office and is much surprised to be invited to an interview with the owners. He seldom gets so far as an interview! The interview seems to go well, and the owners of the business speak encouraging words to the middle-aged man. So the man goes home with some hope of actually getting the job. But a week goes by, and he doesn’t hear from the owners of the advertising company. So he goes back to their office to find out why. Right as he comes through the door, he notices a new employee. She’s a pretty young woman, just out of high school, the kind of person who, on the average, has 75% of his typing speed, 50% of his proofreading ability, and 25% of his talent with prose composition. The employer hired her instead of him because she was prettier than he — and younger, so presumably more malleable. Having come to town solely for the purpose of checking up on his application, the man asks this new girl whether the boss is in. She says no, but can she leave a message? He says he applied for a job, and he was just there to check up on it. She says the position has been filled and the boss isn’t looking to hire anyone else. She smirks. He leaves.

This sort of thing can be repeated hundreds of times, and it is certainly possible that the middle-aged man will run out of money before he is hired. That’s why, very often, when the unemployment check quits, so does the job-hunting. No money for gas or for car maintenance.

And, of course, these days there are many exploiters: human sludge who ordinarily wouldn’t take a job if you gave them one, or else who would just waste the employer’s time and money. But today “Affirmative Action” makes sure that these worthless kinds of people are more likely to get jobs than the more industrious sort of job-seeker.

But there are many of the latter who are frequently told that there’s a job for them across town, or around the corner, somewhere other than in a direct line of sight, a job which vanishes like a mirage when the job-seeker gets close to it. He’s kept in a “run-around” cycle, bouncing between the Employment Office and the city’s employers, for as long as he can afford to keep playing their futile game. The job is always a rumor, which on close inspection turns out to be a fable.

Republicans are generally right when they say that many of the poor are welfare parasites who would not work if work were to be had. But that is a secondary point, a point to be addressed only after there is enough work for everybody to have a job. Until then, we should be more concerned with the primary problem: the fact that there aren’t enough jobs, and that when poor people (really, all people) seek a job, they are often either denied outright or get the bureaucratic runaround, a runaround wherein the job-hunter is made to scurry, scurry, scurry after the possibility of a job, or, rather, the mirage of a possibility of a job. This effort costs the poor money that they do not have, and that is why many people who really do want to work get so discouraged from their depletion that they stop looking.

All of the socio-economic classes are squeezed by the usury built into the fractional reserve money system that we’ve been using since 1913.

When corporate mouthpieces say that they need to lay people off because it is more difficult to make a profit than it used to be, they are not lying.

When the middle class complain that they don’t get ahead no matter how hard they work, they are not lying.

And when the poor tell you that there aren’t enough jobs for everyone who wants a job to have one, they aren’t lying, either.

The problem is usury. The problem is the Federal Reserve System. The problem is the treason in our government that brought that particular Jewish money system into existence and has kept it in place ever since.

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