The Lost Inheritance: Topics List

Chapter 4 (Unemployment)
Topics List

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Ageism: Barrier To Employment: The older IT professional is perceived to have outdated knowledge 'diluted' by his diversity of experience, and to be a career threat to younger 'superiors'.
Corporate Bullying Eradicates The Virtuous Artisan: Where there is no law, the mighty prosper and the weak languish. Under the rule of law, the rich prosper and the poor languish.
Aptitude Profile of a Business Team Must be Balanced: Nature gives to each his unique bequest of talents. But few have the right balance to survive and prosper alone in a capitalist free market.
To Be Able To Borrow Capital You Must Prove You Don't Really Need It: Banks only lend to those who can prove they don't need. But by refusing to lend, banks are in fact withholding what is rightfully ours.
The Job-Seeker: Frustrated and Stifled by Constrictive Official Rules: The inflexible rules, through which government employment advisers are forced to deliver their help, transform the whole process of job-seeking into a futile chore.
Unemployment: The Futility of Searching For Work for The Over-50s: The blind bureaucratic rules forced upon me by unemployment have locked me into an endless iterative procedure which cannot possibly succeed.
Profile of an Ideal Prospective Client
In a Free Market, the Successful Product is Rarely the Best Product: It is the best-marketed, not the best-made, products which win in the free market. And this always benefits the producer, never the consumer.
Forced to Destroy My own Career: The idiotic official rules imposed upon the unemployed have forced me to engage for 10 years in the systematic destruction of my own job market.
Profile of My Ideal Prospective Employer
Employee Plus: Offering Your Skills and Your Product as a Package: Employment is always a buyer's market. The job-seeker who offers most gets the job. Here is a way I have tried to offer more.
Workfare and Unpaid Voluntary Work is Exploitation of the Unemployed: Self-styled moralists argue that the unemployed should be put to work to earn their welfare. But if they work, then why not a wage?
Schizophrenia: A Carer's View: Life does not naturally deal to each an equal share of health, wealth and opportunity. A civilised society is supposed to compensate for such unfairness.
Statistics: Am I "Unemployed", or "Unwillingly Economically Inactive"?: Official figures do not portray unemployment as much of an issue. Figures from independent sources tell a different story. My observations favour the latter.
Unemployment: My Most Intense Time of Personally-Motivated Re-skilling: At the time of writing (summer 2001) I have been unemployed for over 10 years. This alone leads employers to perceive me as permanently unemployable.
Freedom of Travel: A Freedom The Law Allows But Poverty Denies: I live in a so-called free country. Nevertheless, the degree to which my legal freedoms can be realised depends on the extent of my wealth.
Commercial Image: In Whom We Trust, and In Whom We Don't: The ancients worshipped the graven image to whom they prayed daily for their food and protection. Today, their descendants likewise worship the corporate logo.
Interviewer Ignorance: Rejects Both The Good and The Bad: With such negligent wastage of mature talent, it is little wonder the captains of the IT industry are forever bleating about their insoluble skills shortage.
Cost of Seeking Work Locks Unemployed Into Permanent Unemployment: The contemptuously low level of state welfare has left me, as an unemployed job seeker, with insufficient resources with which effectively to seek a job.
DSS Benefit Rules: Thwart Every Opportunity For Re-employment: The restrictive rules imposed by the state, under which I am required to seek work, actively prevent me from exploiting golden opportunities for re-employment.
Market Prejudice: Why Joe Public Won't Buy From Joe Public: The unceasing crescendo of corporate advertising induces a multiplex of impervious prejudices within the minds of those who would otherwise be my natural customers.
An Unemployed Job-Seeker is an Enterprise With No Marketing Budget: Governments, in decreeing what the unemployed job seeker needs to live on, overlook what it costs to market oneself in today's fiercely competitive job market.
Mental Illness: Everybody Else Becomes Weird, Then Back To Normal: Doctors and administrators who have never lived 24 hours a day with a mentally ill spouse can have no perception of what it is like.
The Fragmented Sources of Job Search Information Should Be Brought Together: Competition in the recruitment industry has fragmented and dispersed job vacancy information, making the task of job seeking all but impossible.
Neural Networks: Where is The Promised Bonanza?: Being hailed as a new high-demand area, I decided to re-skill myself to as great a depth as possible in Neural Network technology.
Off-Shore Skills: It's not I but my Country's Economy that's Uncompetitive: In certain foreign economies, a programmer or software engineer can enjoy a good standard of living for one tenth his going rate in the U.K.
Who's the Culprit: "Can work won't work" or "Can employ won't employ"?: An employer has no moral obligation to employ you. It's his business. He built it. He has every right to run it as he pleases. Right?
Personality: Having The Wrong Kind Can Now Bar You From Employment: In an idyllic community, success depends on the quality of one's product or service. In a capitalist free-market, it depends solely on one's political dexterity.
Relocation of Employment: Global Geographic Polarisation of Skills: The demand for information technology design and development skills seems to be gravitating, on a global scale, towards ever fewer and larger geographic centres.
Restrictive Practices: Still Alive and Well in the Global 'Free' Market: The term Free Market implies a domain where all are free to trade their skills, goods and services with anybody else without restriction or hindrance.
Prior Self-employment Causes One To Be Perceived as Unemployable: My 15 years of self-employment followed by 10 years of unemployment, causes employers to perceive me as no longer psychologically suitable for normal employment.
A Corporate Bully Saves Face By Wrongly Blaming A Smaller Participant: Computer projects often turn sour. And when they do, it is the independent artisan who invariably is made the scapegoat.
IT Skills: There's Never Been a Shortage, Only an Inexcusable Wastage: A vast population of unemployed people with leading-edge skills incongruously coexists with an insatiable demand for those same skills. Something is keeping them apart.
TECs: Always There to Help The Employer But Never The Job-Seeker: Systematic job-seeking requires knowledge of one's economic environment. This exists, but in the wrong form and beyond the reach of those who need it.
The Global Market is a Domain in which a Level Playing Field Can't Exist: Contrary to dominant political belief, while the global economy comprises self-ruling nations with different currencies, the proverbial 'playing field' can never be level.
Unfair Contracts of Employment: Corporate Theft of Intellectual Property: An employee is paid for applying himself to the work for which he is employed, but some employers lay claim to far more than they pay for.
White Elephant Projects: What Would the IT Industry do Without Them?: Throughout my career I saw unceasing torrents of government money poured recklessly into projects which could not possibly end other than in failure.
Incompatibility Between Normal Employment and Self Employment: The capitalist free market facilitates many administrative protocols through which one may exchange one's labour for money. Unfortunately most of them are mutually incompatible.
Carer's Diary of a Relapse
The Lost Inheritance, Chapter 4: Structure
Forced Under Threat
Torture Takes its Toll: If what is endured by the immediate family of a relapsing schizophrenic were perpetrated by the interrogators of a Draconian regime, it would be internationally condemned as torture.
Torture: Living with a Relapsing Schizophrenic: If what is endured by the immediate family of a relapsing schizophrenic were perpetrated by the interrogators of a Draconian regime, it would be internationally condemned as torture.
Downshifting: Getting a Lesser Job is Not as Easy as You May Think: Most seem to believe that any highly qualified person, who consistently fails to regain employment in his own field, can easily take a lesser job.