Jobs difficult to find
COMMENTARY
Josh Deitz

Before school started, I took a couple of weeks to visit friends in Atlanta and Toronto.

Most of my friends graduated last year (I’m a fifth year senior — transferring will do that), so they spent the past six or seven months looking for work. The results were a little scary.

Only three of my friends currently have real jobs. All three are elementary school teachers. Everyone else is either unemployed or working a temporary position. They are all intelligent people, very skilled and completely capable of jumping into a variety of positions. The jobs just aren’t there.

So what is a “real” job? I can’t say I have a firm definition. What I mean is a job for which one is trained, is mildly desirable, has an ongoing period of work and has a yearly salary. This seems reasonable to me.

My friends graduated from a variety of schools and have been looking for work in a variety of fields. Some of them are victims of the massive shift of computer jobs overseas. Some are victims of the current lack of corporate spending on architecture and design. Others are just victims of the ongoing economic problems the country has been facing.

There are dozens of things I could blame the lack of jobs on, but one thing is especially vexing. “Productivity” is killing us. As long as our business model revolves around squeezing as much work as possible out of as few employees as possible, we will not be able to create many jobs. To make things worse, the people who are lucky enough to work 60 hours a week see their lives reduced to work and sleep.

Our focus is completely wrong. For the past month, various analysts have been telling us that the economy is finally recovering. If companies are still cutting jobs and people are still suffering, how are we in a recovery?

A jobless recovery is not a recovery at all. If a dozen well-qualified college graduates cannot find steady work, our economy has a long way to go.

Around three million jobs have been lost in the economic downturn. Many of those are not coming back. Between jobs lost to productivity and jobs lost overseas, many positions have ceased to exist. At the same time, there are more people competing for jobs as older workers are forced to delay retirement to bolster their pension funds.

This is a scary time for our generation. It is also an opportunity. This is a chance to change the way we treat work. It is a chance to reclaim vacations and family. It is a chance to stop 35-year-olds from having nervous breakdowns and heart attacks. This is a chance to have a life beyond work.

Europeans average more than 20 days a year of vacation. The Chinese average 15. We average 10. Vacation time would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the travel industry. Changing the way we treat the work week (check out www.timesizing.com) would encourage reducing overall hours rather than wholesale layoffs. Increasing funding for education and social services would create jobs and strengthen America’s social fabric.

Our focus has to change from profit to people. Our generation should lead the change.

Josh Deitz is a senior political science major from Atlanta, Ga. He can be reached at (j.m.deitz@tcu.edu.)