No Longer Just Jose on the Corner Anymore…

Competition at the curbside…

Pinched Workers Seek Out Day Labor

High Joblessness Forces More People From Desk Jobs to Curb-Side Hiring Sites; a Bank Teller Takes Up Housecleaning

The face of day labor appears to be changing, with more women, non-Latinos and former white-collar workers taking up manual labor.

Amid continued high joblessness, employers say they are seeing more workers at curbside hiring sites, or seeking work through less traditional routes such as Craigslist, who before the downturn might have had full-time jobs.

Many lost desk jobs in the hard-hit auto, construction and financial industries. Some see manual labor such as housecleaning or hauling debris, where people are hired and paid per diem, as the only way to survive when jobs in their prior fields have become scarce.

Starting Fresh – When the HR Rep Doesn’t Call

One of things you never will hear crossing a politicians lips when talking about unemployment – is the fact that the 10% unemployment numbers include 5 – 7  million of the unemployed are folks who have college degrees, and would be classified as white collar workers. This situation started shortly after the Dot Com bust, where previously highly paid professional people with significant skill sets were thrown out of work, or forced into underemployment by cascading companies.

During the Bushit Administration, these jobs were heavily “outsourced” to China and India. Another “brilliant” idea when you consider those 160,000 programmers in China attempting to Hack into Google, our military systems, and cripple our grids conducting 3 – 5 million attacks a day…

Were trained largely on corporate America’s dime.

Finding a Job by Starting a Business

Last year, more laid-off managers and executives grew tired of waiting for human resources departments to call them back. They took matters into their own hands by starting companies.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the outplacement firm, regularly keeps track of 3,000 high-level job seekers in a range of industries. Last year, 8.6 percent of these decided to take the start-up route, compared with 5.1 percent in 2008.

The biggest surge was in the third quarter. The hope is that this momentum “will carry into 2010, since new business development is considered critical to a sustainable recovery,” Challenger stated.

After seven years, only about a third of start-ups are still in business, according to a study in the Monthly Labor Review. Most of these companies fail within in the first few years. So in four years or so, it would be interesting to see how many of these entrepreneurs wish they had waited for that H.R. person to call back.