2,400 jobs lost in 2007

:'(

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=123&aid=141422

 

I'm surprised the number isn't much, much higher.

 

At GM or Bank of America or airlines or a lot of other places, the loss of 2,400 jobs has another name:

"Monday"

Places like that would kill for the "Daily Bugle to lay off 17 in newsroom" nuggets we get from time to time.

 

[Jack Shafer] AWESOME! [/Jack Shafer]

 

Or Countrywide or Amgen or Dell or CBS or the twenty-thousand-pink-slipped teachers in California (and pretty soon, Washington Mutual).

 

While I am not making light of anyone losing their job, I try and keep this in perspective. I recall a day in my hometown in 1977 when 5,000 Youngstown steelworkers showed up to work and learned they no longer had jobs. Thirty years later, the city still hasn't recovered. As a matter of fact, it's led to a plan to actually tear down and erase parts of the city.

http://m.cnn.com/cnn/lt_ne/lt_ne/detail/98127;jsessionid=1F485A74692388B59AF85B93CA598569

 

Of course, that's not counting jobs that were "frozen" or positions that were vacated and never replaced.

 

I think that is what it means. There are 2,400 less jobs now than a year ago.

And I don't know how to put this without sounding like an elitist asshole, though I'm sure someone will jump my ass about it, even though I am about as blue-collar as they come and grew up with a dad who was laid off about once a year in an industrial profession:

I understand the plight of the steel worker and the airline checker and all of those other people, and I absolutely sympathize. It's tragic. It's a national fucking tragedy is what it is.

That being said, these are apples and oranges. We got into this because we thought it was an intellectual profession that would insulate us from those kinds of things. We were told to go to college, work hard, etc., etc., etc. by parents who wanted us all to avoid the plight of the working man.

And, comparisons to factory jobs be damned, our industry as we know it is crumbling underneath us. I don't think we're being overly dramatic when we begin to lose hope in moving upward and onward.

 

I can't believe the actual number isn't much much higher

 

There's your national fucking tragedy, right there. Your national fucking pipe dream, they should have called it.

We are the working man. Same as the last generation, only now everybody starts out with a five-figure debt.

 

Maybe people who entered the profession in the late 80s or 90s thought that.

But having entered the workforce during economic times (1982) that were much worse than anything you are seeing now, I sure as hell never thought for one moment that the reason I got into this was because I thought I was insulated from those kinds of things.

 

My mother in the 1990s: Journalism would be good. It's not something they can make overseas with cheap labor and ship back here.

She's also giving stock tips if anybody's interested.