Job Prospects Slimmer Than Me

I churned air today.

Well, no. Not really. It's a Sunday, and normally I use this as a rest day, but since I don't have any days during the week to get things done, it has to fall on my rest day. Ohhh, pooor baby, some are you are saying. Everyone has that to do. I understand that, I'm not complaining, I'm just stating a fact. I did this thing today. Statement of fact.

Most of all it's dealing from digesting the data that we get back from the SHOUT OUT which I have kept in a spreadsheet database. General data like attendance and exactly who was at the SHOUT OUT for that day and who was our feature. This kind of information is invaluable when it comes to spotting trends in our demographics. Further, my brother is busy sending me data concerning who will be our Feature in the coming months for me to also keep track of.

I have to also get my docu- mentation together for WESCARE, because I plan to be out tomorrow to get my MRI. So I have to deal with that too. As they say at FEGS: documentation, documentation, documentation. They can roll that shit up and stick it up their asses, but as it stands, I'm getting it stuck up my ass, and that with no lubrication.

Oh, got some discour- aging news today from the New York Times. 'Job Losses Show Wider Racial Gap in New York'. No shit, Sherlock. Why is that discouraging? BECAUSE I AM BLACK AND LIVING IN NEW YORK! “Low-wage workers and workers who lack skills are really getting hit hard,” he said (David R. Jones, president and chief executive of the Community Service Society, which lobbies on behalf of low-income workers). “These are the workers who are sort of fungible. They lose their jobs very quickly, particularly in retail, the people who move boxes and do unskilled work. There are large numbers of African-Americans in that sector.”

Get this, when they are not hiring in your job sector that you are skilled in, poof, you are an unskilled worker! I'm among the 'people that move boxes'. I would be choice meat for Cablevision, Sprint, AT&T, anything in telecom- munications, but no, they are not hiring right now because when people start tightening their belts, among the first things that go is the cable and the phone bills.

"While unemployment rose steadily for white New Yorkers from the first quarter of 2008 through the first three months of this year, the number of unemployed blacks in the city rose four times as fast, according to a report to be released on Monday by the city comptroller’s office. By the end of March, there were about 80,000 more unemployed blacks than whites, according to the report, even though there are roughly 1.5 million more whites than blacks here."

I also knew this going in. After being fired from my job, I didn't go right back into the telecom- munications market, I went the writer, author direction. That market I knew I didn't have the skill sets, but I was homeless, and I could afford to take a non-paying internship. You may laugh at that, a homeless guy taking a job, but its do-able. Still, I was able to take an internship, but now, with FEGS WESCARE I'll have to ditch any possibility for an internship as a WEP assignment (WEP which stands for Worker Employee Program, or some shit like that where they get you this crummy job for no pay) because it is not guaranteeing me a job. Like the fucking WEP assignment is. Nope. That ditches my chance for any ground level start in some major magazine.

A ground level start where I can make connections and possibly get that job. Shit, I'm a fucking hard worker, a dedicated worker. I can do much. As an unskilled worker. I sit down on my ass. I am an unskilled worker. In the city where the unemployment hits Blacks hardest. "Economists said they were not certain why so many more blacks were losing their jobs in New York, especially when a large share of the layoffs in the city have been in fields where they are not well represented, like finance and professional services. But in those sectors, the economists suggested that blacks may have had less seniority when layoffs occurred. And black workers hold an outsize share of the jobs in retailing and other service industries that have been shrinking as consumers curtail their spending."

These are the very same jobs that WEDONT- CARE tries to get for their number. That means that the Job Developers are having a hard time placing people. Their number averages by 12 people a week. I know, because they are so proud of the number that they publish it on the blackboard of every classroom. Like we don't realize that twice that number is being dragged into FEGS a week. FEGS is so burdened down that they are probably holding up sucking in more people from the welfare ranks. But little do they know that that number will no doubt rise as people start to run out of their Unemployment benefits. It's just a matter of time. Then they can say: "There are more Blacks on Welfare than Whites!"

I'm not pissed about the racial thing, don't get me wrong. I'm pissed because my skin color will no doubt keep me in a very large community trying to get an unskilled job when they do open up. That's unless I go back into telecom- munications. Shit. I have to write this fucking book!

Write this book. That's another thing that I haven't done, is write anything. I'm really not keeping up with my poem a day, although I wrote two last night. Along that line, I worked on the book that I'm co-authoring with my brother. My own book, well, I have that to farm out now. I haven't done that either.

I'm going to have to get off the fucking can, and get on the motherfucking stick.

Hobobob