Do you have standards when looking for a job? What are your standards in job hunting?
What kinds of work would you not do? Why? What are the standards of the job? Pay rates? Company history? Benefits? What the work entails? thank you.
These days, I’d say take anything above minimum wage and expect a big pay cut over what the job paid back in 2004.
For example, my friend is a desktop publisher. She did page layout and some ad layout for a weekly newspaper. She started there in 1996 for only $8 per hour. By 2004, she was up to $11.50 per hour. In 1996 dollars, that was a raise of only $1.50 per hour, the rest was inflation. That’s not bad, but not great.
Since business started to slide, here raises got smaller starting in 2006, when she was making $12.25 per hour, which basically was no raise, just keeping up with inflation. 2007 she made $12.50 per hour, slightly less than the pace of inflation. In 2008 she made $12.75, which would mean a lot less than the pace of inflation. This year there was no raises. They cut staff in January (her job) and eventually folded completely in April this year.
As her "severance" she got to keep her 2002 vintage desktop, a Compaq Presario 4410 with 1.3 ghz Celeron, 40 gig HD, upgraded to 256mb and her 2008 vintage $150 monitor they reluctantly bought in the summer of 2008. Let’s be generous and say this "gift" was worth $200. Not much after 12+ years of loyal service.
Now her unemployment is gone. She works for a craft/fabric store for $8.25 per hour, $1 over our state’s minimum.
So a year ago, she made $12.75 per hour as a desktop publisher. Had she been keeping up with inflation, should have been more like $13.50. Can’t find 40 hour jobs in this field. Part time, as needed, about $12 per hour is all she can get. Does a little bit of work and has to rely on chump change retail work for steady income.
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There are some things I won’t do. I won’t work for collections, for example. I refuse to call people up and harass them when they’ve got plenty of troubles already. There are some things I can’t do, like be on my feet all day. My basic criteria is that I get a job in my field that pays me enough to meet my living expenses. That’s pretty general, but even that’s impossible to find in this current market.
References :
These days, I’d say take anything above minimum wage and expect a big pay cut over what the job paid back in 2004.
For example, my friend is a desktop publisher. She did page layout and some ad layout for a weekly newspaper. She started there in 1996 for only $8 per hour. By 2004, she was up to $11.50 per hour. In 1996 dollars, that was a raise of only $1.50 per hour, the rest was inflation. That’s not bad, but not great.
Since business started to slide, here raises got smaller starting in 2006, when she was making $12.25 per hour, which basically was no raise, just keeping up with inflation. 2007 she made $12.50 per hour, slightly less than the pace of inflation. In 2008 she made $12.75, which would mean a lot less than the pace of inflation. This year there was no raises. They cut staff in January (her job) and eventually folded completely in April this year.
As her "severance" she got to keep her 2002 vintage desktop, a Compaq Presario 4410 with 1.3 ghz Celeron, 40 gig HD, upgraded to 256mb and her 2008 vintage $150 monitor they reluctantly bought in the summer of 2008. Let’s be generous and say this "gift" was worth $200. Not much after 12+ years of loyal service.
Now her unemployment is gone. She works for a craft/fabric store for $8.25 per hour, $1 over our state’s minimum.
So a year ago, she made $12.75 per hour as a desktop publisher. Had she been keeping up with inflation, should have been more like $13.50. Can’t find 40 hour jobs in this field. Part time, as needed, about $12 per hour is all she can get. Does a little bit of work and has to rely on chump change retail work for steady income.
References :
Reality sucks.