Story time as I sit here pen (keyboard) in hand. My ex-wife got a full time job last month. Yep! A real full-time job, not a contract, not a fly by night, not an under the table deal, nope, it was a real full time job with a major (assets of a billion $) company in the high tech world. This means benefits, training, security and a move back into society as a valuable citizen. (Because her last few jobs have been contracts that pay no benefits, she was forced to go on Welfare for 10 months after her savings were gone.) In fact according to the Ottawa Citizen, she was one of 300 out of 54,800 unemployed in the Ottawa Hull area to receive such a gift from the God's. Of course, it took 11 months of searching, countless resumes, many disappointments and a salary cut of $12,000 from what she was making a year ago, but heh, let's not quibble, this is the big uno numo - a real job, a desk, a boss, a paycheck. She started as a programmer in 1979, worked for start-up companies, developed multiple skills, eventually settling on technical writing. You know - that person who takes an engineers notes and converts them into manuals that technicians and customers can read. A high tech person, one of that special breed who has been on the cutting edge of Point of Sale systems in retail, who developed computerized sawmill technology in BC, who has worked on contract for some of the biggest names in high tech, the kind that the market keeps telling us that the world needs. In fact over the last 17 years her career has been bouncing all over the place as Companies go broke, merge, downsize, develop team leadership models, work under old hierarchical systems. So what's my problem. Well it's todays newspaper, that wonderful unbiased, truthful free press that keeps all of us citizens informed about the way the world is and it's a TV show I watched last night on NBC - Dateline. Let's start with Dateline. AT&T had laid off 20,000 people and Dateline followed three of them for a year. One an optical fibre engineer with 17 years experience in R&D, one a woman Budget Director, 27 years experience, and one a janitor, over 20 years experience. Now, you have to remember as I tell this tale, that it is happening in the land of milk and honey, the good ol US of A who we are constantly told has, according to to-days Citizen, only 4.6% of its population without a job. After 11 months of no income, the engineer was reduced to food stamps and was 5 months behind on his rent and his wife brought in the only family income of $100 per week on a partime job. The Budget Director saw her marriage almost break-up and after a years searching got a "real job" again. The janitor was rehired by AT&T and given retraining as a truck driver, took a cut in wages from 8.50 per hour to commision on mileage which required him to drive 6 days a week to average about $6.00 per hr and he hates it. Now perhaps some of the American correspondents can tell me why, in a country which has a 4.6 unemployment rate, why it is these people with multiple years of employment history, degrees and on the job skills take a year to find a job and then why all of them are working for less than they were before and harder? Now, of course, in the great White North, were my daily paper insists that we have had an improvement in unemployment from 9.1% last month to 9.0% this month and the governments finance minister insists that since 1993 - 1997 they have created over a 1,000,000 full time jobs - yep a whole million in a country of about 18 million working people over the last 4 years - and that it is doing the best it can, even though our unemployment rate has not dropped below the official figures of 9% for the whole decade and that we should all be happy - remember the song, "be happy". And in the same paper today, the Ontario government brags that over one half million less people are drawing Welfare, while poverty groups claim that the Ontario government, likes its counterpart in Alberta has had quote "welfare reforms" that have lessened benefits, tighten eligibility requirements and put in place a number of rules that make it impossible for some people to qualify. Meanwhile, in the same paper, a poverty group asserts that the real rate of unemployment in Canada is 18%! Meanwhile in the editorial page, I am told that the "myth" that we are the best country to live in has been refuted by all reputable economists and that the UN is incompetent and that really, Canada has fallen from #3 (1975) to number #12 (1997) in income per person in the whole world. How is anyone able to make sense of this immense flow of contradictory statements from so many authoritative people. On the one hand, Dateline takes me into the lives of 3 American families and shows me their distress and in my own experience, I watch my ex-wife go through 11 months of hell and humiliation and finally consider herself lucky to take a $1000 per month pay cut just to have a job that benefits from her 17 years of experience but doesn't pay for that value. Meanwhile, I'm told by reputable journalists, government officials, statistics, political and economic commentators two things, one everything is terrible, and everything is wonderful, or conversely, everything is caused by someone else's stupidity and that if only they would do "x" everything would come up roses. Call me stupid, but I tend to believe that the highest quality of informational is behavioral. That is those three people on Dateline and my ex-wife's experience are real to me and all those other opinions, facts, stats, theory's are just that famous flatulent product known among the poor as bull-shit and I'm tired of swimming in it. Well, if you read this far, thanks a lot, me, I'm going out to shovel some snow, cut some firewood, and perhaps take my kids to a movie this afternoon, you know, real life stuff with the environment and family. Maybe, this evening, I will sit down and do a little welfare fraud, income tax cheating, networking among my friends for a little special privilege, you know, those things the elites do on their day off. Respectfully, Thomas Lunde
