I'm currently trying to maintain good karma by containing my elation at the final termination of a particularly vexing contract employee. This would be at least the 4th in the last year whose departure has filled me with joy and glee sufficient to make me want to burst forth in song and dance. And I'm sure it won't be the last.
An aside: I spent a summer as a temp working for 3 or 4 different companies for different lengths of time. It sucked. The full-time employees are bitter because you take time to train, you're going to be gone soon, and they KNOW that the company is paying more for you than they're making. Also, most temps suck at their jobs.
If you're a temp, I want you to reread that last paragraph and bear in mind that I was a temp and I honestly believe I was pretty damned good at conducting telephone surveys, taking complaints over the phone, contacting seasonal construction workers and whatever other crap jobs I had to do. But not only was I the exception, I was a college student who was under no illusions that this was going to be anything more than a 14-week diversion from school. And even then, I only ended up with about 6 or 7 weeks of low-paying, dismal, menial, degrading work.
Of course, the temporary or contract-to-hire employee for a degree and/or job experience required gig is a completely different kettle of fish. For one thing, there is a certain group of them who do it because the money is good, the responsibility is minimal and the scenery changes every 12-24 months. And for another thing, a simple desire to get paid isn't in and of itself enough to get a job.
Most of the time.
See, big companies have staffing shortages. Precisely because they have these god-awful hiring processes where 2 HR people, 5 managers, 2 upper-level managers, a lawyer and an accountant have to sign off on each hire and you can't use the same 5 managers in any 7-year period. And when some VP of Something Minimally Useful finally got tired of his management chain kvetching about not having any employees and instituted a shortcut of being able to hire temps/contractors. Of course, since they're temporary, HR decided that the process can't cost as much as it does for a Real Employee, so now temps and contractors are interviewed by the person closest to the interested manager's bathroom at the time that the contractor calls. This is, of course, more often than not, the custodial staff or the guy who hides out in the bathroom to avoid work.
And to make things worse, while there IS this cadre of skilled contractors, anyone not interested in spending half of his or her life finding the next gig frequently decides to try to retire from the contracting gig into full-time employment. And what does that mean? It means that during economic downturns, a disproportionate number of good contractors aren't looking for work.
Even more interesting is if you have a company in, say, the hills of West Virginia or some equally remote place that is a long drive from any respectable center of industry, technology or whatever the hell it is that your company does. Because if you were a contract employee who had to find a new job every year or two, would you rather live in an area where there were lots of jobs and you didn't have to move every year or two or would you rather move to the West Virginia when you know that you're going to have to move again in a year? Unless of course, you REALLY wanted to live in West Virginia for a year... in which case, you're dumber than you look.
So yeah, I'm trying to keep my good karma... but I'm pretty sure that I'm losing.
HAPPY DANCE!!
Just in case any of you were wondering about what healthcare reform is doing to America, it looks like it's going to be providing mental health services to those who most desperately need them and just in time:
Is it possible to appreciate what someone is doing while simultaneously despise them for why they're doing it? Take Joe Lieberman: he's against a taxpayer-subsidized public healthcare plan... and as a Libertarian, I can respect that. But he's against it because he's a total shill for the US Health Insurance Companies and thus I loathe him.
And really, I suspect that if you drilled down to it, I would probably loathe most, if not all of the members of the US Congress for being total shills to some organization. Which is, of course, why I enjoy watching Jon Stewart skewer members of Congress for their utter corruption.
At the same time, who is really to blame if not the people who elected them? Which is another way of saying that the American people get exactly who they deserve to govern them. I was reminded of this again the other morning when I was listening to a thoughtful piece on Afghanistan on NPR and then they switched over to something about Tiger Woods. Yes, Tiger Woods... ON NPR ... and no, they weren't talking about anything newsworthy.
And of course, let's not even mention Fox News, whose entire journalistic credibility could be balanced upon the tip of a needle, whilst still leaving room for a rather healthy angel conga line.
I guess my point is that I'm rather disgusted with the state of US news coverage these days and every time the healthcare reform bill comes back up, I want to stab myself in the ears. Because really, are we even talking about the issue of healthcare reform anymore or are we simply generating noise?
And while I'm at the subject of nonsense, is the Republican party helping by all but guaranteeing a filibuster? Of course not. I suppose it could be argued that they're giving moderate Democrats more traction ... but they're also giving liberal Democrats far more sway than if the party of "limited government" and "fiscal responsibility" (*cough* *cough* bull#$@&) would actually engage the issue of healthcare reform. But that party is far too scared that Fox News would accuse them of buddying up with the Democrats. And so we have an admittedly-broken healthcare system that will be "fixed" almost exclusively by more government because the Republicans refuse to be a part of the solution. And the American public will mouth-breathe their way through this and somehow, my broke self will end up paying for it.
Maybe Toad is right... maybe we SHOULD hate all of the involved parties.