Slate Interview: Its hard living on food stamps

In a previous job, I was in the position to hire reporters for a trade publication. I should note we didn't pay for moving assistance, though we might give a bonus to help with costs.

We did get out-of-town applicants. But generally we hired locally. There were two problems with out-of-town applicants. One was that to offset the risk of moving, they wanted a large pay raise, one we generally couldn't match. The other, and this was bigger, was that if they had property to sell, they just couldn't go. I had at least one reporter back out because she couldn't sell her condo, and if she didn't do that, she couldn't afford to move.

 

Which was my point. Papers are still existing (somewhat), they're just shedding jobs.

 

Until that factory closes. Then you're stuck in an area of the country away from your family and friends.

 

I'm not sure what you expect.

You don't sign a 45-year contract when you graduate college that guarantees you employment until age 67.

The smartest, most resourceful, hardest working and most adaptable people likely will never be unemployed. Then again, maybe they will. Steve Jobs got the boot from the company he founded.

It's not a company's responsibility to keep you employed. It's your responsibility to yourself to make sure you are needed and in demand.

 

It's societies job to decide if we're happy with that or if we can try to shape things to be better for more people.

 

On the surface this is true, and it is important to practice when you're young and single. But a transient population always following the "work" doesn't create much of a community fabric. It leads to a breakdown in families. What conservatives so often struggle to understand, or simply don't care to understand, is the amount of damage constant financial instability does to the family structure they claim to hold so dear. If the No. 1 priority is always the company's wants/needs/virtues, you either think human beings are cold, heartless robots or you're banking on them not getting mad enough to make companies pay sufficient attention. History tells us neither is a viable reality.

 

Yeah, that's definitely what YF was talking about ... [/bluefont]

 

This, 100 percent. Anyone who relocates for a newspaper job had better be getting a contract of at least three years.

In fact, I can see a day where newspaper jobs are similar to local TV news jobs. All the TV reporters work on two- or three-year contracts. Question is, are you willing to move 1,500 miles away for only three years of security?

 

No such thing in print journalism. Period, full stop, end of sentence, end of paragraph, end of story.

To have a union contract AT ALL in journalism is damn rare enough these days, and even if you have such a contract, it almost always allows the company to 'reduce the force' at its discretion, which means: last in, first out.

 

Nobody's talking about 45-year employment. We're talking about moving to where there are jobs. Yet, as most of us know, employment is very tenuous these days, and it's a risk to move somewhere else where there is little-to-no support system just for a job.

 

It's a risk to make pretty much any life decision (marriage, children, join the military, buy a house, invest your savings, live in an earthquake/hurricane area).