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Coming Soon? Brace for 80% Less Salary or $2-a-Day Pay

On By The Social CriticIn Economics & Globalization, Politics & Public Policy, Technology & ScienceLeave a comment

She’s the world’s wealthiest woman you’ve never heard of and she’s saying something you probably wish you hadn’t: “Gina Rinehart, world’s richest woman, makes case for $2-a-day pay“,the Los Angeles Times reports.

The Australian mining heiress has a problem. The cost of running a mining operation in Australia cannot compete with Africans willing to work a continent away for $2 per day.

There’s a certain elementary logic to Rinehart’s argument. If the two nations are selling raw materials at vastly different prices because of vastly different costs of labor, her operation loses. In a worse-case scenario, it might not even make sense to go on operating. From Rinehart’s perspective, profit is the objective and benevolence is a job — never mind if the jobs she creates fails to compensate workers well enough to keep the lights on. She’s precariously positioned on that slippery slope so common to today’s political and trade debates: It could be worse: no jobs.

The world’s richest woman has a point. But it doesn’t pass the sustainable-future test.

Some 25-years ago when global “free trade” was hawked by conservatives and liberals as a win-win for business interests and the world’s impoverished alike, the promise was to “raise all boats”. Indeed, in many ways it has. Rural Third World peasants — depending on how one looks at it, born into a harsh or bucolic life — have left land and sea to toil in immense factories, working 12 or more hours for dimes a day to sew our garments, assemble our toasters and televisions, print our books and increasingly, even, to can our food. As a result: An entire generation of aspirational laborers now shares the dream of a more affluent life in the big city — pay no mind to the slums. If not reality, it’s hope that keeps the wheels of progress rolling.

Perhaps out of nostalgia for the past we downplay the social, economic and environmental ramifications of the world’s most populous nations, China and India, following our same choppy path to progress. We were once like them: Fearless, youthful economies, willing to strip entire mountains and topple entire forests for a fast buck (and in some parts of the country, we still are). Still, what needs to be asked at this juncture in the global trade game doesn’t get its due but is having its way with us just the same.

Who says our Third World trade partners must start where we did — to make the same mistakes from child labor and water unfit to drink to the foreign-policy blunders of a voracious economy jockeying for access to other nation’s natural resources?

Whether by romanticism or a misread of history, those of us in the First World rarely pause to question if the type of progress the world has made is the kind of progress that can or must continue unchecked and unchallenged, unrefined and unexamined.

Isn’t the benefit of progress chiefly that it can be shared?

The task, seemingly, was straightforward. Before formalizing trade relationships, establish common human rights, currency and environmental rules of play so as not to touch off the dreaded “race to the bottom”. Instead, we apparently assumed the influx of Western money would do the talking for us, free markets, democratize governments and civilize those who would seek to exploit others.

The massacre of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, in its time, should have signaled the intellectual and political free-trade hopefuls that something was amiss. The 21st Century ushered in yet another reminder: the promise of the Arab Spring evaporated into something resembling less the democracy we had hoped for, more the sectarian rule we feared. Still we persist in the hope against hope that opportunity, for its own sake, is the best policy.

What if it’s not?

The cracks in the globalized foundation are beyond dispute now: The American Dream is under siege like never before. Europe is straining under the yoke of a common currency and uncommonly high debts. Yet China, for all its recent effort to dominate world trade, is not to blame. The threat of being pulled under by emergent economic powers that share little in common with our political value system is largely a beast of our own creation: Made in the USA.

Presidential candidates, in the worst economy in decades, remain paradoxically vague. The culprits underlying greater income inequality and the perception of lessening opportunity are catchalls: Apparently, just about everything in the West is too pricey: labor, taxes, regulations — even minimum wage. And with 7 percent of American workers represented by unions, on AM talk radio and elsewhere, they nonetheless shoulder the lion’s share of the blame.

With no shortage of conjecture — too often the kind that builds on stereotypes and divides friend, family, “haves” and “have nots” — it is long overdue to put economic dogmas to the test. Can the United States of America, one of the few and the blessed nations to become a freedom- and living-standard envy of the world, afford to downplay diminishing wages, increasing personal and government debts, a widening gap between the rich and the poor, monetary policy that punishes savers, severe trade deficits, and the unrealized hope that the educational and ecosystems can keep pace with these changes and challenges?

The way in which we order our lives, policies and expectations — particularly the role of technology in creating vs. displacing jobs —- must be examined.

Do we produce for the sake of producing and compete for the sake of competing — or should technical and economic progress exist for the sake of improving quality of life? Should our definition of success hinge on that of the few, the highly talented, educated and well connected — or that of the ordinary, everyman in his and her capacity to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives“, as candidate Mitt Romney put it?

Buffeting the chaotic sea of public opinion are prevailing cultural assumptions surrounding old, individualistic aims confronted by new, inadequate financial realities. Our grandparents’ generation was one in which a single breadwinner could support a household working a blue-collar job. Today, particularly in high-cost areas of the country, the gainfully employed, college educated — even childless —- struggle. Others launch seemingly successful households, by all appearances living out the American Dream, only to do so at their parents’ and in-laws’ expense. In other words, instead of one or two breadwinners sustaining a single-family household, increasingly “it takes a village”.

For a culture steeped in tales of striking out on one’s own at a tender age with nothing but the clothes on one’s back, rising from rags to riches in the process, social immobility isn’t a reality we are prepared to accept.

In 2005, for the first time in US history, the average household owed some 130 percent of their annual income, writes Nan Mooney in “(Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents“. Is the cost of a refrigerator or an Internet connection really to blame for our slipping grasp? Does an iPhone or a gym membership endanger retirement planning or place individuals and families one crisis away from financial ruin?

To hear the pundits talk, yes. Americans, who fewer than 30 years ago left public universities without crushing debts, who worked jobs they did not expect to lose, who steadily ascended the income ladder, building equity in their homes and money on their investments, do not seem to fully appreciate how radically things have changed in the 13 years since we fretted over Y2K, crossing the threshold into a new millennium. American families lost nearly 40 percent of their wealth between 2007 and 2010 alone. Grocery prices are on the rise, too. Gasoline represents nearly 10 percent of consumers’ monthly spending, nearly double what we spent in 2004 — and still the price at the pump edges closer to the suffocating $5-per-gallon mark. Healthcare premiums for families have climbed nearly 90 percent in the past decade, Mooney writes. Colleges are turning away students and career changers eager to enroll even as they push the ones they do admit into two- and six-figure debts, crimping graduates’ spending power for decades. Real inflation — as tabulated by the pre-globalization formula that through the late ’80s accounted for rising food and energy prices — reveals still more about why consumers “remain cautious” month after month, quarter after quarter.

Opportunities that were possible for the children of middle- and working-class parents fewer than 15 years ago are increasingly the province of those born to the political elite, successful entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, media personalities, sports stars and celebrities.

That’s not the America most of us grew up in. And it’s not the state-of-affairs most wish to pass on to the next generation.

It is not without irony that the very people who have suffered current-day financial realities the least shout from the highest bully pulpits, insistent that little has changed that a solid work ethic can’t overcome. Who are these people who would have us believe that our eyes and ears deceive us? They are our talk radio hosts, our well-heeled TV commentators; they are our retired parents or grandparents who have successfully cleared the home stretch — they are even our siblings and peers that went into dentistry rather than information technology, finance rather than teaching.

Except they’re wrong.

In her 2008 book Mooney asks: “Why the dramatic change? The economics are simple and well documented. We’re earning less and having to pay for more. Earnings for college graduates have remained stagnant for the past five years, but the cost of housing, healthcare and education have all risen faster than inflation. The share of family income devoted to ‘fixed costs’ like housing, child care, health insurance and taxes has climbed from 53 percent to 75 percent in the past two decades.”

The math doesn’t add up. From little more than 25 percent disposable income comes saving for a rainy day, cash for job retraining and the presumably “irresponsible” act of personal spending — stimulating the economy the old-fashioned way. And yet for increasing numbers of Americans, even those unscathed by a long spate of unemployment, lurks the sinking suspicion that more pain than gain this way comes. According to Rasmussen Reports, just 14 percent of the Americans surveyed in July 2012 — a new low — are of the opinion their children will be better off than they were.

They — you — are not imagining things.

Dong Tao, a Credit Suisse economist, in a November 2010 CNN interview, put it bluntly: To “re-balance” the world economy the Chinese must consume more — and Americans must earn “at least 80 percent less salary”. Shocking though such a revelation may be, the mass media didn’t touch Tao’s statement with a 10-foot pole. The Internet, for all its reputation as a repository for everything ever said or written, is also a place where information disappears. (After a brief spate online, CNN’s interview transcripts for that conversation are nowhere to be found.)

The question that keeps making the rounds in this election year is this: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

In an era fraught with “tied hands”, domestically and globally, it may matter less who occupies the Oval Office — less than the pundits and partisans would have us believe, in any case. Why? Because there are no easy answers, no magic-bullet policy decisions, no quick fixes, no sure bets. Deficits are skyrocketing, money is devaluing, automation and rock-bottom Third World labor continues to undermine First World wages — and, increasingly, our counterparts in the Third World are sharing in the pain as the “sure thing” of Western consumerism ramps down.

The piper is calling.

The erosive economic forces with which we grapple are not personal or even particularly American — they’re global. The year ahead promises to be one in which corporate profits, propped up by deep payroll cuts and unprecedented infusions of liquidity into the realm of high finance, take a tumble as the reality of a weakening consumer class works its way up to Wall Street where, for the moment, the band plays on. The Federal Reserve will exhaust its bag of tricks while Democrats and Republicans, for all their efforts to deflect blame, continue to come up short on solutions.

The two parties have become so good at pointing fingers they’ve forgotten how to make the tough and unpopular decisions — to lead.

For all the uncertainty, it isn’t the election or the political grandstanding that deserves our sole concern. The public mindset matters too. Some three years post recession, one from which we never truly recovered, one wonders how long it will take for the gravity of this worldwide crisis to hold the attention of the percentage of the American population that doesn’t read newspapers, dismisses the “liberal media” out of hand, isn’t all that attuned to the world beyond their own backyards, and yet jumps, stubbornly and often at the price of great personal resentment, on the usual suspects — the freeloading, big-spending “lazy American” who assuredly wants little more out of life than to shamelessly shill for handouts. (Apparently slackers come in spades in Australia, too: Rinehart is purported to have said her fellow Aussies can make a respectable living if they drink and socialize less.)

The 47 percent of Americans Gov. Romney dismisses as “victims” in a May 17 fundraiser will nevertheless be his constituents should he become president. Will the nation’s would-be commander-in-chief acknowledge that years of kowtowing to special interests by those on both sides of the isle who claim the title of public servant has done more to victimize the nation than any basement-dwelling, election-day skipping, moocher ever could?

Seemingly, not.

Former comptroller general, David Walker, put it best during his “Fiscal Wake Up Tour“, documented in the 2008 film “IOUSA”. With the backing of the nation’s best-known liberal and conservative think tanks, he warns that the United States faces the prospect of increasing taxes, dwindling services and a lack of funds for basic expenditures like national defense. His is a prescient call to action issued well before the controversial implementation of TARP and the $16 trillion-dollar deficits of today.

The future is here, ready or not.

The throws of crisis are not the time to launch a witch hunt in search of easy targets. Ours is a time to ask not what one can do for oneself but for the good of one’s country. Over 200 years into the American story, individualism is alive and well — the self-made desire to have more, do more, be more. And yet national pride in this age of global trade and travel, passe though it may seem in today’s climate of privatizing nearly every source of shared glory, deserves its due too. Patriotism, after all, is an inclusive notion. Rather than rationalize a climate of infighting and backbiting, perhaps it’s time we began in earnest to watch each others’ backs.

In the interest of a more perfect union, we’re gonna need all the cohesion we can get. And when tough people encounter tough times, seeing the best in ourselves — one another — is the American way, too.

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RESOURCES

Where Free Market Economists Go Wrong | Reason

So-Called Free Trade — Bad Policy and Wrong Debate | Huffington Post

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets | Amazon

Myths of Free Trade: Why American Trade Policy Has Failed | Amazon

Six Savvy Job Snagging Tips

On By The Social CriticIn Economics & Globalization1 Comment

Job hunting in a down economy can feel like running a marathon in the dark. How do you market yourself for optimal impact? What’s gimmicky vs. eye-catching? After completing the application and/or the interview, do you call or not?

The typical career-seeker guide emphasizes custom cover letters, asking a friend to help proofread your resume and networking both online and off to keep your word-of-mouth employment prospects fresh. But what should you do once you begin to receive those initial nibbles from a prospective employer or personnel agency?

In two words: Get savvy.

1) Phone Screenings. Phone screenings are both good and bad. Good news in the sense that you’ve risen to the top of the stack. Bad news in the sense that your application may land in the recycle bin before you’ve made face-to-face contact.

The solution? Take charge.

Ideally, when an employer or recruiter cold calls they should first ask: “Is this a good time to speak?”

Oftentimes, recruiters are in a mad dash to submit “their candidate” and the convenient catch may win out over the ideal match. Responding to a voicemail or email hours or days after the fact is in all likelihood time spent on a lost opportunity. The first thing you should do after posting your career profile online is to prepare for the inevitable phone call that comes at a bad time. Do you pounce or pass up?

First, do not hesitate to thank the caller. If first contact comes at a bad time, emphasize your eagerness to answer pre-employment questions at a time of his or her convenience. In this way you avoid the suggestion that you are inconvenienced. Do not volunteer details that can be construed as a lack of interest or an excuse. Stick to your objective, which is to agree on a mutually suitable time to talk. The objective early on should be to learn if the position is currently available or if you are being considered for a future project. The answer will provide a clue about the urgency of the opportunity as opposed to the likelihood that the recruiter or employer is simply seeking to round out their database.

2) Remote Screening vs. In-Person Interview. The go-nowhere interview unfolds when you spend a lengthy amount of time on the phone or in a video conference with a recruiter or prospective employer only to be left to wonder if a face-to-face interview will follow.

What to do? Prepare.

Look at a phone or Skype screening like a date. Your objective is to land a second date. You don’t want to play hard-to-get but you don’t want to give it all away, either. For instance, you may wish to set a 15-minute time limit on the conversation. After that predetermined amount of time lapses confirm your desire for an in-person interview. If the caller puts you off, allow a another 10 minutes to lapse — or the conversation to wrap up, whichever comes first — and make your case: “I feel there is no substitute for a face-to-face interview. Do you have the ability to set one up?”

In particular, don’t mince words when dealing with a recruitment agency.

It is vital not to get too far into an email exchange or telephone conversation without asking a key question: Has the firm or individual in question been authorized to recruit for the job in question? If a staffing agency does not represent the employer exclusively chances are you have been contacted by someone who is skimming career websites in much the same way you are, in which case you will have no special advantage — and perhaps a disadvantage — in working with a middleman. Staffing firms often go up against other agencies and candidates who are applying directly for a job that has already been made public. The one thing a recruiter doesn’t want is to submit you for a job that another agency, or you yourself, beat them to first. So don’t be shy. When contacted about a position for a “confidential client” seek to clarify whether you have already attempted to land that job by another name or another description elsewhere online. Use this opportunity to make a decision to work with an agency or to apply directly.

It is not uncommon after the initial screening to receive a vague answer about when you might be expected to learn whether you will progress to a face-to-face or second round of interviews. Proceed by A) clarifying who, what, when and where that next step may occur, B) asking whether the recruiter or HR representative has any concerns or questions that you might be able to address while you have their attention, and C) requesting permission to follow up at a specific time in the event you don’t hear from that individual first. Your objective is to obtain a name, title, email address and/or telephone number. Make good use of it!

3) The Fishing Expedition: Perhaps nothing is more unsettling than the feeling that your caller is more interested in using you to help better define their job description or salary range or, in the case of staffing agencies, to tap your references to build their own leads rather than to seriously consider you. Some unsolicited recruitment efforts pertain to jobs that do not yet exist and/or the vacancy remains unfilled week after week and month after month because the employer is in no hurry to fill the position.

Solution: Define your expectations.

As an applicant, be on the lookout for job ads that repeat all too frequently. The employer may be indecisive or job turnover is incredibly high, suggesting that the dynamics of the company or organization are in disarray. Determine how much or how little time you can afford to set aside for recruitment firms or employers who routinely advertise the same opening. This economy is what they call an “employer’s market”. There is no shortage of applicants. Qualified help is within reach for employers who are serious about hiring. To keep false hopes at bay and the time and expense of chasing dead-ends to a minimum, learn whether or not you are competing in the interview process for a position held by an internal candidate as opposed to a genuine vacancy. Similarly, if you are invited to undergo pre-interview aptitude testing, ask how many people you are competing against and how to properly prepare.

Safeguarding your morale is as an important consideration as any other. It’s important to discern between opportunities you lost to a more qualified competitor and opportunities that never were. One tip-off is the email or phone inquiry in which the foremost question pertains to your salary history or requirements. This is the employment equivalent of jumping in the sack on the first date. A reputable employer will not solicit your salary requirement as a means to low-ball someone else or to determine how much they will pay for the position. Think about it: If the employer has a very narrow budget for the position they have every opportunity to state as much up front. Most career websites offer hiring managers the option to specify the pay range, which if utilized will all but eliminate job seekers who wish to work for higher pay. In so doing, applicants can take some of the work out of the equation by screening themselves out. So ask yourself: Why should your employer withhold the pay range yet ask each and every applicant — before an interview of any kind — to divulge theirs? Unless your salary or hourly pay requirements are particularly inflexible, save the conversation for a later point in the hiring process. True, some employers will require a salary history up front — but you need not apply if it is too intimate for comfort. (There are plenty more who won’t ask up front.)

4) The Interview: Congratulations! You have their attention. Now it’s time to prove that you can deliver in a face-to-face interview. You know that you have to show up on time, dress appropriately, greet your interviewer(s) with a smile and a firm handshake and understand both the requirements of the job and the company itself.  But what else can you do to stand head-and-shoulders above the rest?

Solution: Strike a balance.

To strike a balance you have to keep two primary factors in mind: The personality of the interviewer vs. your own strengths and weaknesses. Do you tend to be outspoken, blunt or quick to wear your heart on your sleeve? With a little work, these traits can convey confidence and enthusiasm. Without that effort, these same traits can display impulsiveness or negativity. Conversely, do you tend toward introversion, preferring to take your time to warm up to new people and situations? This can convey maturity and professionalism on the one hand, or aloofness and passivity on the other. One way to approach this is to practice the technique of mirroring. Does your interviewer display speech, personality or body language characteristics that you can relate to? Find a way to relate and reflect commonalities. In this respect, an interview is very much like a date. Put your best foot forward and show genuine interest in the person to whom you are speaking. Most people are flattered by a good listener. If you can draw your interviewer out — talking about him or herself as opposed to a scripted list of questions — it’s a good sign. On the flip side, most people are off-put by a poor conversationalist. Contribute to the conversation but keep your side of it succinct, upbeat and politically correct.

5) Qualifications: If your interview is typical you will spend a good chunk of it being quizzed about relevant career history. The problem: These conversations can slip into the past tense. Don’t. Use active tense. A good resume will quantify your level of experience — beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert and/or the number of years you have accumulated in that skill. Depending on the skill of your interviewer, the interview may rehash or elaborate on your application. A successful interview will delve into specific ways in which you can tie the job description to your skills. Come prepared to share your strongest anecdotes and concise examples that follow the PAR format — Problem, Assessment, Response. But that’s not all you can do to increase the odds of being hired.

Solution: Become the interviewer.

The ultimate goal of any hiring decision is to recruit the right person for the job. Sometimes a lack of experience can be offset by an abundance of enthusiasm. In other cases, a lack of interpersonal skills can be overcome with an impressive set of intellectual accomplishments. But more often than not, applicants fall somewhere in the middle — a place where “average” may not leave much of an impression. Turn the odds in your favor by probing for details that go beyond the job description. Are you replacing someone? In so many words, find out what that person did to do your prospective job well — or not. Ask your prospective boss what type of employee he or she wants to interact with and how frequently. What type of corporate culture is at play? Is there a real-world example of someone in a similar role earning a pay raise or promotion? Will your supervisors be most concerned with chain-of-command, collaboration or independent thinkers and “self-starters”? 

The idea here is not to interrogate your interviewer(s). Rather, formulate a few key questions and weave them in and out of the interview at natural junctures in the conversation. Once you have gleaned a reasonable amount of information about what makes your interviewer tick, present yourself as a solution. Recap your sales pitch at the close of the interview in a three-point format. Reflect what you perceive to be the challenges and opportunities of the position and summarize, briefly but specifically, how your presence at the company can provide a pragmatic, interpersonal, innovative or profit-building solution. The bonus? While you are in the process of asking questions of your own you will appear less passive and more intelligently engaged in the conversation — and the job at hand. And while it may seem all too obvious, end your interview with a reminder that you enjoyed the conversation and would like to land the job!

6) Follow Up: You’ve been contacted by email and phone. You have competed the first round of interviews. What do you do next?

Solution: Don’t be a stranger.

It’s a fact: Some employers will intentionally ignore a promising prospective candidate, preferring instead to hire someone who shows persistence. This presents a challenge for the job seeker because there’s an equal but opposite camp: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” Here’s where a great deal of luck and some old-fashioned intuition come into play. If you feel you are a 10 out of 10 match for the job, be bold. If you feel the interview was only lukewarm or the job description a bit “over your head”, err on the side of caution. If the job description says “Do not call”, email instead. If the interview has already taken place, don’t leave without a business card and a clear idea what to expect. If you have already come as far as an in-person interview it is particularly important to ask for permission to follow up — and when best to do so — and then keep your word by doing just that. Immediately following your interview, meanwhile, mail a hand-written “thank you” note. The post-interview period is not the time to become overly creative/desperate (a stalker). Follow, instead, the KISS rule: Keep It Simple Stupid! Specifically, A) don’t try to sell yourself yet again in your correspondence; and B) don’t write anything that sounds overly scripted, generic or canned (impersonal). Do tell your interviewer(s) in your own words that you would be honored to work with him or her; C) put to use the same common sense about your post-interview communication as you did in your initial application: Don’t submit something you haven’t proofread, and if possible enlist the help of someone whom you trust for their strong English skills and their astute sense of objectivity.

Six savvy job hunting tips later, you are now equipped to meet the challenges of a tough job market. Go for it!

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RESOURCES

Final Cut: Words to Strike from Your Resume | FORBES