Category: employment

I Made a 911 Funny Today

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Things are in flux at work. The US Army has cancelled itsMulti-Function Utility/Logistics and Equipment Vehicle (MULE), and the MULE is supposed to be the lead platform for the Autonomous Navigation System (ANS) that I am working on.

So, the future path for our program is not clear, and rumors are running rampant.

With the end of the fiscal year coming up, we got an update on the current state of the rumor mill from our boss at our department’s weekly meeting, which is a rather humane, and intelligent way of handling things.

He noted that there was still plenty to do in either case, so we shouldn’t slack off:

Boss: We need statuses on progress, so we don’t go into airplane mode.

Me: Airplane mode?

Boss: (Makes throwing motion) Throwing paper airplanes as you get to the end. (instead of working)

Me: Oh, I thought that you meant 911.

You know, I think that this is the first actually funny joke about 911* that I’ve heard, and I was the one who made it.

And BTW, as the meeting was breaking up, the boss’s de facto number 2 threw a paper airplane.

It’s a nice group of people there.

Needless to say, posting is likely to be light for a while, I have work to wrap up, and a resume to update.

*Yes, I know all the jokes about “Hijackers surprised to find themselves in hell” stuff, but that is not a 911 joke, it’s a hijacker joke.

Guess What, The ADP Employment Numbers Suck

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Their report on job activity in the service sector is the weakest it has been in over a year:

The pace of growth in the services sector ticked down unexpectedly in July to the lowest level since February 2010 and the number of jobs created by the private sector also slowed, reports showed on Wednesday.

Taken alongside disappointing data on the manufacturing sector earlier in the week, the services data showed an economy that was frustrating hopes for a rebound in the second half of the year after a very weak first half.

“It looks like this confirms that we are in a bit of a soft patch here,” said Rudy Narvas, senior economist at Societe Generale in New York.

Gee Rudy, you think?

It’s getting to be a habit:  The economy looks a little bit better, Washington declares victory on the recession, backs off, and we slide back into the abyss.

It’s 1937 over, and over, and over, and over, again.

More Foreign Worker Visa Fraud

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It turns out that notorious software off shoring operation Infosys decided at some point that cheating H1b visa fraud was too damn much time and money so they have become more inventive:

In a case that threatens to scald Infosys in the North American market, from where it gets over 60% of its revenues, and intensify the debate on outsourcing in the US, Jack Palmer said the company was circumventing H-1B visa rules by sending low-level and unskilled employees to the US on B1 visas instead.

H-1B visas, which are needed to send employees to work in the US, have become more expensive and harder to get than B1 visas that are only meant for meeting, conferences and business negotiations. Palmer, who has been working with the company since 2008, further said that Infosys managers in the US were intentionally committing fraud to avoid paying taxes locally and that the company mistreated him when he filed a complaint as part of the whistleblower policy.

Outsourcing has been an inflammable issue in the US as it continues to struggle with high unemployment. The Indian IT services have often been accused of taking away American jobs to cheaper destinations. This anti-outsourcing sentiment has also resulted in visa norms becoming more stringent in the past few years.

This raises an interesting point.

My solution to H1b visa abuse, it’s largely used to bring in cheap labor and depress wages, is to raise the cost of the application and permitting process, but obviously this would tend to drive exactly this sort of fraud.

I’m beginning to think a bounty program, with people who rat out their employers getting 3 to 5 year work permits, might be the most effective way to deal with enforcing the laws.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

The Unemployed Need not Apply

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Many employers are now explicitly saying in their ads that they only hire people who are currently employed:

That is the message being broadcast by many of the nation’s employers, making it even more difficult for 14 million jobless Americans to get back to work.

A recent review of job vacancy postings on popular sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Craigslist revealed hundreds that said employers would consider (or at least “strongly prefer”) only people currently employed or just recently laid off.

Unemployed workers have long suspected that the gaping holes on their résumés left them less attractive to employers. But with the country in the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression, many had hoped employers would be more forgiving.

“I feel like I am being shunned by our entire society,” said Kelly Wiedemer, 45, an information technology operations analyst who said a recruiter had told her that despite her skill set she would be a “hard sell” because she had been out of work for more than six months.

Legal experts say that the practice probably does not violate discrimination laws because unemployment is not a protected status, like age or race. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently held a hearing, though, on whether discriminating against the jobless might be illegal because it disproportionately hurts older people and blacks.

The American business culture is truly repulsive.

Jobless Thursday on Friday

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Well, initial claims for unemployment fell to 405,000, but it’s still above 400,000, well above where we need to have it to see a meaningful job growth (generally about 375K is where you start seeing job growth).

The 4-week moving average, as well as emergency claims fell, though the regular continuing claims rose.

The problem here is three things:

  1. Jobs
  2. Jobs
  3. Jobs

But unfortunately the people who are supposed to be fixing this are determined to spend their time making it worse by cutting the deficit in the near term.

Job Report Sucks Need about 175K to keep up rate climbes to 9.2%

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Yesterday’s news, that unemployment claims remain stubbornly high was not great news, but the the monthly non-farm payroll report was horrific, with just 18,000 jobs created. about 1/3 of , and May’s number was adjusted downward from about 50,000 to 25,000.

Additionally the unemployment number (U3) rose to 9.2%, and the more inclusive U6 rose by 1% to 16.4.

This was about ⅓ of the forecast, and to provide some perspective Canada, with a population only a tenth of ours, created 22,000 jobs, and in order to accommodate natural growth in the workforce, you probably need 175,000 jobs a month to be created.

What is going on here is that we are on the trailing end of the stimulus, so even without the current mania in Washington, DC to cut government spending, we would be seeing contraction government spending, which, unsurprisingly results in contraction.

Until we goose the economy with sufficient government spending, and establish policies that encourage banks and businesses to part with their cash reserves, we won’t see much improvement.

Considering Obama’s mania for austerity and the confidence fairy, I’m beginning to think that the only way we get a recovery is if something like the debt limit triggers a precipitous fall in the US dollar, which would then create an export driven recovery.

We are completely f%$#ed.

The Mess that Michelle Rhee Left Behind

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The Washington Post has a fascinating profile of respected school principal Bill Kerlina, who quit to bake cupcakes (really):

Bill Kerlina won a plum assignment when he was hired away from Montgomery County in July 2009 to become a principal in Northwest Washington. Phoebe Hearst Elementary was a small, high-performing school, right across the street from Sidwell Friends.
He grew to love its students, teachers and — for the most part — its parents.
“If I could lift that school up and put it in a functional school system, it would be perfect,” he said.
Instead, he said, the dysfunction he encountered in D.C. public schools led him to quit this month, fed up and burned out.
Principals in the District and other cities leave all the time, for a range of reasons. At least 20 of the District’s 123 public schools will have new leaders when classes begin in late August.The churn is especially heavy at low-performing schools. A 2010 study showed that nearly two-thirds of Chicago’s struggling schools had three or more principals in the past decade.
But Kerlina, a baby-faced 39, is leaving Hearst, not a struggling school in a poor neighborhood. He’s also leaving education altogether after 17 years — to go into the gourmet cupcake business.

Usually, resignations and firings unfold in silence, with officials citing privacy laws and educators reluctant to burn bridges. But a series of interviews with Kerlina offers a rare view of D.C. reform from an insider talking out of school.

He said he is quitting a system that evaluates teachers but doesn’t support their growth, that knuckles under to unreasonable demands from parents, and that focuses excessively on recruiting neighborhood families to a school where most students come from outside the attendance zone.

Generally, people on the way out doen’t talk, but in his case, he’s leaving the biz, so describes the dysfunction in detail:

  • Teacher “accountability” with evaluations, but no meaningful training for teachers to be able to actually meet these standards.
  • Lack of support of principals when dealing with excessively demanding parents.  (Not so sympathetic on this one, as my wife and I are pretty demanding about getting our kids special ed needs addressed.)
  • That he was pressured to whiten his school.

Here is the money quote:

Kerlina signed on just as Rhee was rolling out the IMPACT evaluation system, which called for five classroom observations to assess criteria such as clarity of presentation, content knowledge and ability to teach children with varying skill levels. Some teachers would be held accountable for student growth on standardized tests. Those with poor evaluations were subject to dismissal.

It was a major change.Kerlina said he was surprised when he heard it would not be tried on a pilot basis, which was standard practice in Montgomery. He said he came to believe that the initiative offered virtually no provisions to help teachers improve.

“The reform, in my opinion, is getting rid of people,” he said.

It’s been very clear for a long time that Michelle Rhee was doing pump and dump on the DC Public Schools, she had no plan whatsoever on early childhood education, and her goal was to fire black administrators and teachers in the hope of bringing white students into the school, to create a bump in the test scores.

This is not education reform, this is private equity style asset stripping writ on the public schools.

Silly Developing Nations, Don’t You Know that the IMF is for White People?

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So, Christine Lagarde has been appointed the new head of the IMF.

What striking about all this is how the powers that be have insisted that they need to have a European in charge, because of the current crises in the Euro zone.

Gee, no one ever said that when it was Indonesia, Mexico, Korea, Malaysia, etc., but once it’s the Euro’s head in the noose, suddenly we need to institute a affirmative action for white people legacy admissions program for the window office at a major international financial agency.

Not Enough Bullets

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Just who do you think that the World Bank would hire as their treasurer? Why it would be the chief risk officer for Lehman when it collapsed:

The World Bank has appointed Madelyn Antoncic as its new vice president and treasurer.

Ms Antoncic served as Lehman Brothers’ chief risk officer from 2002 to 2007 and following the collapse of the bank, stayed on for a year as managing director and senior advisor at the Lehman Estate, helping to maximise value for creditors.

Having begun her career as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, she has worked for Goldman Sachs in various posts (including head of market risk management), and for Barclays Capital, before joining Lehman Brothers in 1999.

In her new role, Ms Antoncic will be responsible for maintaining the World Bank’s standing in financial markets and for managing an extensive client advisory, transaction, and asset management business.

Seriously, in the self dealing nepotistic and moronic world in which they live, there is literally nothing that a bankster can do,* that can prevent them from being given high profile high prestige jobs.

There are indications that she was opposed to Lehman’s high risk strategy, but she chose to stay, and get a do-nothing government relations position.

If she, as chief risk officer, was unwilling to leave when she saw what was going on, and she was frozen out, any organization that hires her as treasurer has absolutely no credibility at all.

It’s like putting Charlie Sheen in charge of your chastity and sobriety department.

This is why not prosecuting was such a bad idea. Like bad pennies, people like this keep coming back to do even more harm.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

*As long as you are white anyway. See the fall of Raj Raj Rajaratnam as an illustration.

This is the Legacy of Arne Duncan

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You know, the guy who ran the Chicago schools, and was chosen to run the Department of Education, where he has gone full in on bashing teachers supporting the for-profit educational industrial complex.

Well. I’m not sure if he set the tone in the Chicago School district, or was just a product of it, but the fact that the Chicago Public Schools froze teacher salaries while jacking up pay for senior executives:

Though they voted last week to rescind four percent pay raises for teachers and union school workers, the Chicago Board of Education today is expected to approve salaries for the newly installed Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and four other top executives that, by and large, mark substantial increases over their predecessors’ pay.

As the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday, Brizard’s base salary – $250,000 – tops former CPS head Ron Huberman’s salary by $20,000 – and is the highest pay rate for any city executive excluding the city’s new police chief, Garry McCarthy. It is also an annual salary nearly $40,000 higher than the head of New York City’s school system, though less than the public schools chiefs in Los Angeles and other cities.

Salaries for the other four executives are less dramatic, but still more than their Daley administration predecessors. New Chief Education Officer Noemi Donoso, who is slated to rake in $195,000, is making $2,150 more than the former education officer. New Chief of Staff Andrea Saenz, who will be paid $165,000 annually, is making $49,000 more than those who came before. CPS chief administrative officer Tim Cawley and communications officer Becky Carroll are slated to take in $35,833 and $34,617 base salary increases over their Daley counterparts, earning $215,000 and $165,000 salaries respectively.

So their goal is to make American schools more like the banks.

They sh%$ on the workers, and extract as much money as possible out of the enterprise to overpay the incompetent rat-f%$#s in charge.

Some Democrats Just Got a Small Clue

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Senators Durbin and Schumer have come out and explicitly accused the ‘Phants of deliberately tanking the economy for political gain:

hey’ve made it explicit. Democrats are accusing Republicans of trying to sabotage the recovery — or at least stall it — by blocking all short-term measures to boost the economy, even ones they previously supported.

In a Capitol press conference Wednesday, the Senate’s top Democrats argued that Republicans don’t want to pass measures like a temporary payroll tax holiday for employers because they’ll improve President Obama’s re-election chances.

“Our Republican colleagues in the House and Senate are driven by putting one man out of work: President Obama,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL).

The harshest denunciation came from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the man who crafted the Dems’ new “jobs first” message.

“We are also open to hiring incentives, perhaps in the form of a payroll tax cut for employers that was floated by the administration…. [T]hat might not be our first choice, that shows how willing we are to work with the Republicans to create jobs. It’s pro-business, it’s a tax cut, and many Republicans have been for it in the past. But now all of a sudden they’re coming out against it,” Schumer said.

They should have been saying this 6 months ago.

First, it’s true, second, it’s good politics, and third, it’s true.

Too Big to Fail, and Now Too Big to Sue

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That is what the Supreme Court ruled today. They basically said that despite the fact that Wal-Mart systematically discriminated against women in every one of their stores, the millions of women impacted were too large a group to be certified as a class for a class-action suit:

But Wal-Mart doesn’t have to worry any more.

Justice Scalia expressed the Court’s opinion — which was unanimous — that the class action suit was too large and varied to carry forward.

So the solution to avoid pesky lawsuits for real wrong doing, you just have to be so big that the courts will give you a free pass.

First the banks are above the law, and now the monster that Sam Walton created.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

Mixed News on Jobless Thursday

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Initial jobless claims fell, but remained over 400,000, 414 K specifically, with the 4-week moving average remaining flat, with both continuing and emergency claims falling slightly.

It is a little better but the claims numbers are still, in the words of Jimmy McMillan, “Too Damn High.”

Additionally, the Philadelphia Fed’s survey of business outlook fell to a nearly two year row.

But all the very serious people keep saying that “Prosperity is just around the corner.”

It’s Jobless Thursday

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And once again, the initial claims numbers suck wet farts from dead pigeons, rising by 1000 to 427,000, as opposed to falling to 419,000 as forecast, though the 4-week moving average, the continuing, and extended claims all fell slightly.

This is not a glass half full, or too big a glass, this just sucks.

While Washington, DC is obsessing on making things good for the banks, which is what all this deficit cutting/austerity is really all about, this economy remains in the dump.