As regular readers will know in the past few years I have suffered in jobs as a result of individual words and sentences that I have uttered. These were not rude words or offensive sentences, they just did not fit with very exacting standards that employers have around every word you might utter. I have got into trouble for saying ‘I am not a cleaner’ when in fact I was not a cleaner. I have got into trouble for trying to notify my manager of a hospital appointment connected with my diabetes. I have got into trouble discussing the curriculum that the boy who lived in my house was studying. I have got into trouble for saying that I was not responsible for organising an even date that, in fact, I truly was not responsible for organising. I guess one problem is that as yet I have not learnt how to suck up all the blame being levelled at my managers as if it was my own fault; I do not step forward fast enough or enthusiastically enough to take the blame off their shoulders and as a result it is open season to criticise me as ‘inappropriate’ or rude or incompetent. The censorship and self-censorship that develops can harm companies, see: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html
Now, I know from people who have written to me, that I am not alone in suffering such problems and that schools should teach young people that in any job, no matter how competent they might, they must always expect to be the ‘fall guy’ for any errors made around them even if they are not connected to them. My mistake has been not been ready to do that. Ironically as a consequence I am portrayed as the one creating a ‘blame culture’ simply because I am not able to absorb the blame into myself quickly enough. In this I am hampered further as it seems I have Asperger’s Syndrome. Whilst I doubt it has worsened in recent years, the clear changes in UK society and in working culture mean that there are more pitfalls that I may be missing with heavy consequences for my job and thus for the rest of my life which has been largely wrecked this year.
I began a new job in September and was relieved that a lot of the behaviour I have noted above was absent. This was both relaxing and also reminded me how abnormal the previous places actually were. Workers should behave as adults not primary school children and certainly it seemed as if that was more the case where I am now working, despite the fact that the company, like most in the UK is facing hard economic times and so instability. However, the seemingly warm reception I received in this job clearly led me into a false sense of security. I had originally gone there, scared from my previous jobs to mention anything about my life outside work or my past. However, with people confiding in me about their cancer treatment, medical conditions, marital problems, etc., I too opened up especially about some of the things that have hit me this year. Partly this was also because I have had to speak with people so much about losing my job, my house and household that they have now become mundane; they are the ache that has become dull so to me these things are no longer a big issue. To start viewing this way and even letting down my guard a little has proven to be a big mistake.
On Friday I was summoned to see my line manager who outlined the complaints against me. Now, these differ in nature to the problems I have had before. These days I avoid making statements unprompted even to people I think will not distort them. However, when people ask me questions I respond truthfully. Given that the workplace has an atmosphere of being open, people have asked direct personal questions that they might not have done elsewhere. The first was that I had been asked why I was eating biscuits during a training session. I explained briefly that this was because as a diabetic I tend to have a low blood sugar in the late afternoon especially when I have been on a day’s training as had been the case that day and so ran the risk of hypoglaecemia. I know I should not have used the word ‘hypoglaecemia’ but when you have had a condition 24 years as I have done, you tend to slip into these things. I have explained my diabetes to hundreds of people, so think nothing of it.
The second one was I was asked why I had left the lovely town on the south coast that I have recently moved from, by someone who still lives close by but is also employed now by the same company as me. I responded, ‘because I lost my house’. Now that is the truthful answer, it is the only reason why I left, but again that was an unacceptable answer. A similar situation came when waiting for a meeting to start there were comments at how the set-up of the room resembled that for an interview. I was asked as a newly appointed member of staff, how many interviews I had had. Again I told the truth: ‘67 in the past 4 years’.
I have noted before how people feel somehow contaminated by reference to redundancy and unemployment: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/how-redundancy-became-dirty-word-once.html However, when asked a direct question, and this may be as a result of Asperger’s, I have the tendency to give the truth. Yet, me describing what has happened to me or my medical condition, not in an unprompted way, but in response to a question, is these days seen as ‘inappropriate’ and even verging on the offensive. Clearly I cannot read the mind of the person asking me the question. I have been alerted to the fact by one company that has interviewed me three times, that I give an answer without first having ascertaining the type of answer the questioner is looking for. I missed out on the training on this approach to answering at school, university and in work. In fact, I received the opposite: answer a question as directly and truthfully as you can. I know I am enthusiastic when talking with people and these days they will not tolerate an answer which is shorter than the question asked. I thought I had cracked that with the answers given above. However, now I have to also quickly judge whether the truthful answer is what they are seeking.
I am in no position to say ‘well that is my business’ as I could clearly have done with these three personal questions or even ‘why are you asking that?’ as that would clearly been seen as rude. You cannot be defensive as that rouses suspicion. The truth, if it encompasses failure or illness or simply bad luck is also unacceptable whether given briefly or explained in full. Thus, my line manager has now advised me to come up with what I call a ‘legend’. This is the term used by spies and undercover police to describe the false identity they establish. It is a fiction, weaving in elements of the truth, but in general appealing to the assumptions of the people that the agent will be working with whilst distancing this fictional personality from the agent’s genuine one. I need to learn this legend well and be able to respond with aspects of it whenever I am asked a personal question again. I have to be careful, as, unfortunately, I have already revealed the truth about my life to quite a few people. I also have to avoid slip-ups that contradict or differ from what I have said before.
Now, from the troublesome questions I have faced recently, I have to come up with an explanation for why I might eat carbohydrates in the afternoon, which does not reference any medical condition nor makes me appear a glutton. I suppose in future I must sneak off to the toilet to eat them. This presents an ideological challenge for me. Back in 2005 when the UK law put diabetics into the disabled category, I took the decision to ‘come out’ as a diabetic. Now it appears I have to go back into the medical closet and conceal my condition as best I can. In terms of why I left the town, I am rather stumped what to say. All the suggestions about house prices seem to be equally as negative and something along the lines that the area was going down clearly are not true to people who know the town. If I say it is simply because I tired of the place, that might make me look feckless. Even saying that I moved to be closer to family would sound like there was bad luck if not for me then for them, so that is out. With the interviews, clearly I have to severely reduce the number. I cannot really guess what the tolerable number of interviews would be over a 4-year period, do readers think 10 still sounds excessive?
The one thing that I must bury even deeper in my legend, is a sense of indignation. People accuse me of self-pity, however, it is impossible to keep lying to yourself that things will get better or to take all the blame on to yourself for how you have been mistreated; as it is, I cannot shake the sense of guilt at what I may have done wrong, not helped by people telling me that I am a 'natural victim', something which I reject entirely as that is the path to racism and disability discrimination, things I will have no truck with. As the government tells us that we need to suffer for the sake of the country, people in many workplaces see it as wrong to even indicate that you are suffering as a consequence. I cannot reveal how badly I have been treated in previous jobs, the social class discrimination, the disability discrimination and the simple maliciousness I have encountered. I cannot express my dismay at the fact that in 2009 I earned £42,000 per year and had 35 days leave and now earn £26,000 (what I was earning in 2002) and get 19 days and 2 hours leave (what is the point of 2 hours’ leave?). I have to pretend that my life has not gone down the drain in so many ways and that my chances of ever owning even a flat, let alone a house, are now zero. I have to conceal how the pressure from the bad treatment I have received has worsened my blood pressure and consequently my eye sight. My legend has to show me as a successful man, going places despite the worst economic depression in 80 years. It has to pander to the assumptions of the people who ask me questions. It has to provide the answers that they find acceptable, because it has been made very clear to me that in fact, they cannot handle the truth.
Showing posts with label redundancy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label redundancy. Show all posts
Friday, 26 October 2012
Thursday, 1 December 2011
How Redundancy Became A Dirty Word Once More
I remember during the last depression in the British economy in the 1980s when redundancy became commonplace, even for people in what had previously seemed ‘jobs for life’ that there remained an attitude ingrained from the 1950s and 1960s that people were made redundant as a result of something they had done wrong. I guess in middle class professions the attitude was perhaps even older because in the 1930s when mass unemployment first really hit national consciousness it was often very regionally and sectorally focused on heavy industries in northern England, Scotland and South Wales, whereas much of the Midlands and the South and new more technological and service sector industries did not suffer nearly so much. My father was only made redundant once in a career which lasted about 43 years and that was at an age when he was entitled to early retirement. My mother was never laid off, but that was because she was a nurse and it has only been in recent years that nurses have been unable to find work very easily.
Going back to the 1980s, my father had a friend he had known since childhood, who worked in the construction industry. I still remember the sticker he had in the back of his car which said ‘Don’t Nationalise Building’ and had a picture of a pair of hands one holding a brick and one a mortar trowel, locked together with handcuffs. The whole campaign these days somehow seems as alien as something that might have been run in East Germany at the time. Anyway, he was made redundant as happened to millions of middle aged family men in the 1980s alongside all sorts of people. I remember being told that his mother was so ashamed that he had been made redundant that she would not talk about it. She could no disassociate being laid off because the company had closed down or was ‘downsizing’ from being sacked for improper behaviour or laziness. Though it was her son, she could not shake the sense that he had done something wrong to be without work. I never found out if she changed her attitudes. My father advised his friend to train in computers which were just coming in on a large scale at the time. The friend took the advice and in his next job avoided further redundancy because of the skills he had and was able to continue working to a profitable retirement.
In my career which has spanned 20 years this year, I have been made redundant three times. In addition, for much of the time I have been on fixed term contracts, which whilst being set up that way have pretty much the same effect when they come to an end, especially if you are uncertain if the contract is going to be renewed or not, something you are usually only told late on. The similarity of the end of such contracts to redundancy is why in the UK since 2002 companies have had to pay redundancy pay if they do not renew the contract of a worker on a contract of 2 years or more. In addition, if the person has been on contracts for 4 years they have to be moved to a permanent contract. This was because previously there were cases of workers on contracts for 12 years with no security. While it might seem the same in terms of pay and condition, that threat of your job coming to an end through no fault of your own does prey on your mind and reduces your productivity.
Anyway, redundancy has been a fact of working life for at least thirty years and in certain industries it has been incredibly common. Now, always on the lookout for a new job, especially as I always seem to end up with the most appalling managers and working far from home, I subscribe to online services such as Monster and LinkedIn. As well as the job searching, CV listing and networking facilities these sites often send you articles about work. Many of these seem to be influenced by US tendencies, which Americans appear to believe are universal, at least for their English-speaking cousins. However, some of them appear to be quite comic to British readers especially when it comes to the precision about matters of clothing for the workplace. For a start we do not have Labor Day and no self-respecting businesswoman would ever wear white shoes to work anyway; for men black suits without a stripe have no such negative connotations that they seem to have in the USA. Setting such cultural differences aside, reading US workplace attitudes can be useful as British employers have a common tendency to follow their American counterparts sooner or later.
The interesting trend I have picked up on at a time when we are facing high unemployment and redundancies, is how ‘redundancy’ is once again a dirty word as if we were back in the early 1980s. I received an article from LinkedIn about networking which advised you when speaking to people you should never mention you have been made redundant and should find some euphemism for the period that you were without work as if it was some kind of dirty secret rather than a fact of working life for people at all levels.
My view of why this attitude has reappeared is that it stems from other recent trends in business. I have heard from employers in my sector and others that two of the key things they value from employees are not their ICT skills or their ability to manage projects or speak a foreign language but ‘deference’ and ‘gratitude’. Employers, or rather managers at all levels, are leveraging the fact that jobs are scarce in order to compel a forelock-tugging attitude towards them from among their staff. They expect workers not only to be grateful for their jobs but to actually say this repeatedly. Of course, because there are recruitment processes in place, often the job is not a gift of your manager but once in post you have to behave as if it is and as a result, regularly thank your manager and support their view no matter how hare-brained or unethical it might be. To even propose a different approach is to be ‘disloyal’, not with a view to the company as a whole but to the individual who wields power over you. I have noted before that even commentators on business have observed that this attitude is unhealthy for a company that wants to survive let alone prosper in the current economic climate: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html
It is interesting that the Coalition government is seeking to reduce the opportunity for industrial tribunals and even remove the chance to protest unfair dismissal. Clearly their view is that all dismissal is ‘fair’. The government is aiming to reinforce this attitude that all workers, whether professionally qualified or not should simply keep their mouths shut and accept whatever they are told by their bosses and similarly to accept the prejudiced treatment which is once again increasingly common.
How does this connect to mentioning redundancy in your career history? Well, managers never like you hear you criticising your previous employers even if they are competitors. They assume that if you are critical of the previous companies you have worked for you can easily be critical of them, something we know they now have no tolerance for. Mentioning redundancy in a single word seems to be critical of the planning of that company and of their treatment of their workers. In addition, you are exhibiting ingratitude for not expressing how grateful you were that the company actually employed you in the first place and kept you there for as many years and months as they did. I soon noticed this three jobs back when I, along with 200 others (the first phase in a lay-off of 500 staff), were told we were being made redundant. I was criticised for any mention of the fact and my email account was shut down because my ‘Out-of-Office’ statement mentioned it. Despite that 10% of the staff were in line to be made redundant gave us no right to discuss it. Consequently it became impossible to even hand over work to the staff who were remaining and projects very close to completion were simply dropped, unfinished with the funds that had gone into them wasted as I was not allowed to talk with people who could have picked them up and finished them off as it would have meant me saying why I would not be around to do it myself.
In such circumstances reality begins to become distorted. Simply because of the criticism-phobia which is now permitted among managers, money is allowed to be wasted and no proper follow on from a period of large-scale redundancy can be implemented, further damaging the company. We have to face up to what is being balanced up here. On one side it is that some managers for a few weeks will be irritated that staff being made redundant talk about it, on the other side thousands of pounds is wasted and projects left unfinished damaging the funds and reputation of the company. Yet, in our distorted world it is the managers’ unease which wins out.
There is an additional way in which the person being made redundant suffers if they cannot mention that they have been made redundant and this is when you apply for other jobs. You have to come up with a range of more or less feasible excuses for why you left your previous employment. With fragmented careers it becomes increasingly difficult to produce good ones and interviewers become suspicious, assuming that you must be hiding something. Of course, it would be easy if you could simply state the reason as ‘redundancy’ but to do so would clearly damage your chances for the new job, yet often the alternatives are little better. Saying you left because you no longer fitted in, for family reasons, for better pay or conditions, to work nearer to home and so on all seem to provide reasons not to employ you in another post. It would be better if you could say I was made redundant, it had nothing to do with my abilities it was simply the company could not afford to employ me and 499 other people any longer.
The default assumption by interviewers that you are seeking to hide something just accentuates this problem. Too often interviews are coming to resemble police interrogations. Rather than trying to gauge what skills you have and whether you could apply them in a new post they cross-examine you to find any flaws in your story. Having read advice about writing a CV I had begun only listing jobs going back over the past 10-12 years. This was a big mistake at one interview. They spent the whole time asking me about my work in the 1990s and in the post-interview feedback said it was because they believed I had been serving a prison term at that time, not realising that at their company the form declaring that I had no criminal record was sent to their human resources department. It seems that other excuses used to conceal redundancy could open you up to a similar risk.
By making redundancy once again a taboo subject the myth that we have total control over our careers is promoted and the view that we are to blame if they are at all disrupted. In turn the view is perpetuated that companies are blameless for the hardships they impose on the ordinary worker even if, as if often the case in the UK, it is the result of bad planning, inertia or not being alert to changing conditions. It is particularly galling when your redundancy comes as the result of some development you tried to alert the company to but were choked off by the ‘I don’t want to hear that’ mentality which is so prevalent.
In the 21st century redundancy is going to be a factor for every worker no matter how illustrious a career path they take. Even members of the boards of multi-nationals lose their jobs. What we need is not to somehow brush it under the carpet but acknowledge it is a fact of working life and not make the person made redundant feel guilty for something that is imposed on them simply because it makes some managers feel a little uncomfortable for a short time. Compared to the worry and financial pressures the person losing their job faces, such unease is nothing and should not become the prime driver for workplace expectations of behaviour.
Going back to the 1980s, my father had a friend he had known since childhood, who worked in the construction industry. I still remember the sticker he had in the back of his car which said ‘Don’t Nationalise Building’ and had a picture of a pair of hands one holding a brick and one a mortar trowel, locked together with handcuffs. The whole campaign these days somehow seems as alien as something that might have been run in East Germany at the time. Anyway, he was made redundant as happened to millions of middle aged family men in the 1980s alongside all sorts of people. I remember being told that his mother was so ashamed that he had been made redundant that she would not talk about it. She could no disassociate being laid off because the company had closed down or was ‘downsizing’ from being sacked for improper behaviour or laziness. Though it was her son, she could not shake the sense that he had done something wrong to be without work. I never found out if she changed her attitudes. My father advised his friend to train in computers which were just coming in on a large scale at the time. The friend took the advice and in his next job avoided further redundancy because of the skills he had and was able to continue working to a profitable retirement.
In my career which has spanned 20 years this year, I have been made redundant three times. In addition, for much of the time I have been on fixed term contracts, which whilst being set up that way have pretty much the same effect when they come to an end, especially if you are uncertain if the contract is going to be renewed or not, something you are usually only told late on. The similarity of the end of such contracts to redundancy is why in the UK since 2002 companies have had to pay redundancy pay if they do not renew the contract of a worker on a contract of 2 years or more. In addition, if the person has been on contracts for 4 years they have to be moved to a permanent contract. This was because previously there were cases of workers on contracts for 12 years with no security. While it might seem the same in terms of pay and condition, that threat of your job coming to an end through no fault of your own does prey on your mind and reduces your productivity.
Anyway, redundancy has been a fact of working life for at least thirty years and in certain industries it has been incredibly common. Now, always on the lookout for a new job, especially as I always seem to end up with the most appalling managers and working far from home, I subscribe to online services such as Monster and LinkedIn. As well as the job searching, CV listing and networking facilities these sites often send you articles about work. Many of these seem to be influenced by US tendencies, which Americans appear to believe are universal, at least for their English-speaking cousins. However, some of them appear to be quite comic to British readers especially when it comes to the precision about matters of clothing for the workplace. For a start we do not have Labor Day and no self-respecting businesswoman would ever wear white shoes to work anyway; for men black suits without a stripe have no such negative connotations that they seem to have in the USA. Setting such cultural differences aside, reading US workplace attitudes can be useful as British employers have a common tendency to follow their American counterparts sooner or later.
The interesting trend I have picked up on at a time when we are facing high unemployment and redundancies, is how ‘redundancy’ is once again a dirty word as if we were back in the early 1980s. I received an article from LinkedIn about networking which advised you when speaking to people you should never mention you have been made redundant and should find some euphemism for the period that you were without work as if it was some kind of dirty secret rather than a fact of working life for people at all levels.
My view of why this attitude has reappeared is that it stems from other recent trends in business. I have heard from employers in my sector and others that two of the key things they value from employees are not their ICT skills or their ability to manage projects or speak a foreign language but ‘deference’ and ‘gratitude’. Employers, or rather managers at all levels, are leveraging the fact that jobs are scarce in order to compel a forelock-tugging attitude towards them from among their staff. They expect workers not only to be grateful for their jobs but to actually say this repeatedly. Of course, because there are recruitment processes in place, often the job is not a gift of your manager but once in post you have to behave as if it is and as a result, regularly thank your manager and support their view no matter how hare-brained or unethical it might be. To even propose a different approach is to be ‘disloyal’, not with a view to the company as a whole but to the individual who wields power over you. I have noted before that even commentators on business have observed that this attitude is unhealthy for a company that wants to survive let alone prosper in the current economic climate: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html
It is interesting that the Coalition government is seeking to reduce the opportunity for industrial tribunals and even remove the chance to protest unfair dismissal. Clearly their view is that all dismissal is ‘fair’. The government is aiming to reinforce this attitude that all workers, whether professionally qualified or not should simply keep their mouths shut and accept whatever they are told by their bosses and similarly to accept the prejudiced treatment which is once again increasingly common.
How does this connect to mentioning redundancy in your career history? Well, managers never like you hear you criticising your previous employers even if they are competitors. They assume that if you are critical of the previous companies you have worked for you can easily be critical of them, something we know they now have no tolerance for. Mentioning redundancy in a single word seems to be critical of the planning of that company and of their treatment of their workers. In addition, you are exhibiting ingratitude for not expressing how grateful you were that the company actually employed you in the first place and kept you there for as many years and months as they did. I soon noticed this three jobs back when I, along with 200 others (the first phase in a lay-off of 500 staff), were told we were being made redundant. I was criticised for any mention of the fact and my email account was shut down because my ‘Out-of-Office’ statement mentioned it. Despite that 10% of the staff were in line to be made redundant gave us no right to discuss it. Consequently it became impossible to even hand over work to the staff who were remaining and projects very close to completion were simply dropped, unfinished with the funds that had gone into them wasted as I was not allowed to talk with people who could have picked them up and finished them off as it would have meant me saying why I would not be around to do it myself.
In such circumstances reality begins to become distorted. Simply because of the criticism-phobia which is now permitted among managers, money is allowed to be wasted and no proper follow on from a period of large-scale redundancy can be implemented, further damaging the company. We have to face up to what is being balanced up here. On one side it is that some managers for a few weeks will be irritated that staff being made redundant talk about it, on the other side thousands of pounds is wasted and projects left unfinished damaging the funds and reputation of the company. Yet, in our distorted world it is the managers’ unease which wins out.
There is an additional way in which the person being made redundant suffers if they cannot mention that they have been made redundant and this is when you apply for other jobs. You have to come up with a range of more or less feasible excuses for why you left your previous employment. With fragmented careers it becomes increasingly difficult to produce good ones and interviewers become suspicious, assuming that you must be hiding something. Of course, it would be easy if you could simply state the reason as ‘redundancy’ but to do so would clearly damage your chances for the new job, yet often the alternatives are little better. Saying you left because you no longer fitted in, for family reasons, for better pay or conditions, to work nearer to home and so on all seem to provide reasons not to employ you in another post. It would be better if you could say I was made redundant, it had nothing to do with my abilities it was simply the company could not afford to employ me and 499 other people any longer.
The default assumption by interviewers that you are seeking to hide something just accentuates this problem. Too often interviews are coming to resemble police interrogations. Rather than trying to gauge what skills you have and whether you could apply them in a new post they cross-examine you to find any flaws in your story. Having read advice about writing a CV I had begun only listing jobs going back over the past 10-12 years. This was a big mistake at one interview. They spent the whole time asking me about my work in the 1990s and in the post-interview feedback said it was because they believed I had been serving a prison term at that time, not realising that at their company the form declaring that I had no criminal record was sent to their human resources department. It seems that other excuses used to conceal redundancy could open you up to a similar risk.
By making redundancy once again a taboo subject the myth that we have total control over our careers is promoted and the view that we are to blame if they are at all disrupted. In turn the view is perpetuated that companies are blameless for the hardships they impose on the ordinary worker even if, as if often the case in the UK, it is the result of bad planning, inertia or not being alert to changing conditions. It is particularly galling when your redundancy comes as the result of some development you tried to alert the company to but were choked off by the ‘I don’t want to hear that’ mentality which is so prevalent.
In the 21st century redundancy is going to be a factor for every worker no matter how illustrious a career path they take. Even members of the boards of multi-nationals lose their jobs. What we need is not to somehow brush it under the carpet but acknowledge it is a fact of working life and not make the person made redundant feel guilty for something that is imposed on them simply because it makes some managers feel a little uncomfortable for a short time. Compared to the worry and financial pressures the person losing their job faces, such unease is nothing and should not become the prime driver for workplace expectations of behaviour.
Saturday, 19 June 2010
'Oh, Your Job Didn't End in the Correct Way': Additional Challenges of Claiming Benefit
As regular readers might have noticed I am again unemployed. Unlike last year when made redundant, this time it seemed to be that I could claim Jobseeker's Allowance, i.e. unemployment benefit without much trouble. I am keen to find a job and I had a full set of National Insurance contributions. Having paid such contributions is one way of being entitled to receive Jobseeker's Allowance when unemployed, the other is having too little money and being assessed on a means-tested, i.e. needs basis. You have to prove you are actively seeking work which means not implying too narrow parameters in terms of the distance you will travel for work, the hours you will work or the type of work you will do. You have to do at least 3 activities per week, e.g. look on websites, look in newspapers, ring an employer, etc. and apply for 2 jobs per week. Bascially I know in my job that I have to move for work and though I said I am seeking it in a 130 Km radius of my house, I actually applied for jobs 255 Km from home so far. I have also applied for all kinds of things in business and the civil service. In two weeks I have applied for seven jobs so am in with the quota. I attend my signing on time twenty minutes early and do everything that you are supposed to do in order to claim benefit.
In contrast to last year when the Department for Work and Pensions seemed to have a problem with me sharing a house with a woman who ran her own business, this year things went smoothly. Rather than having to wait 2½ months to receive my first payment, this time it took just 2 weeks. I was told that the benefit will continue for six months and then I can be reassessed on means-tested basis. That is not brilliant news but it is better than nothing. That was until today when I received a letter saying, that despite them already paying me benefit they had questions over how my last job ended and so might not only cut off my benefit but want what they have paid (£65 per week for two weeks) repaid.
Now, I have written before how unpleasant my last employers were. See my posting: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/12/sledgehammer-management.html My line manager actively sought out any minor thing to attack me with and when this seemed insufficient this manager began making up things. By the end my line manager was claiming tens of colleagues had complained about me, but when I asked them they had no idea what my line manager was talking about. My line manager made discriminatory comments about me which later unsurprisingly could not recollect. Then this manager went on to fabricate stories to the personnel staff and was bent on pushing me out. The union representative was incredulous at what he felt was a playground style behaviour and by the end even the personnel manager did not involve my manager in talks. As it was my department was going to be merged with another meaning that there was going two people doing my job, me and another, in the new merged department. So, personnel offered me a deal, voluntary redundancy if I did not make a victimisation claim against my line manager. I got a far better payment than when made redundant from my last company which I had worked for, for over four years. As it has turned out this month I probably would have faced compulsory redundancy anyway.
Now, however, I fear my line manager has not been satisfied with the arrangement and is out to cause me trouble as I sign on. This manager made clear the opinion that I was unsuitable for the post right from the start and kept trying to get me into lower grade posts. I believe the manager had some condition, possibly Asperger's because the manager printed out every email received and underlined individual words. Me getting a settlement is probably galling to my former manager and I fear this is leading to trouble. I suspect a letter has been sent, 'informant letters' as they are termed in the civil service, saying falsely that I was sacked. I hold tight to the letter which outlines the details of the agreement. The trouble is, the decisions are taken far distant from my local job centre and I fear that my benefit will be cut off without me ever getting the chance to counter the vindictiveness of my former manager. In theory if you resign or are sacked from a job you cannot claim benefit for six months. In this case, even when you have made a deal it seems that people can twist it around to rule you out of getting benefit. I both loathe and fear how much power one bitter individual who was prejudiced against me from the first occasion we met and made that very clear, can wield over me even after I am far away from that job. I suppose I should not be surprised that in the neo-Thatcherite era we are living in, as an ordinary person you are going to get hammered by the privilege and they will continue hammering you even when you are far from their site because they loathe anyone who challenges what they seem to believe is the sanctified right to behave how they choose and discriminate just as they feel.
I have long written that I anticipate losing my house to repossession and this certainly seems another step in that direction. I suppose under a regime in which there have been proposals to cut free school meals for the poorest 15% of children in order to pay for the 'free' schools scheme, in fact the freedom for parents to set up schools wherever they choose and only let in the people they like, we should not be surprised that at all levels of society the privileged are stamping down on us in every way they can.
In contrast to last year when the Department for Work and Pensions seemed to have a problem with me sharing a house with a woman who ran her own business, this year things went smoothly. Rather than having to wait 2½ months to receive my first payment, this time it took just 2 weeks. I was told that the benefit will continue for six months and then I can be reassessed on means-tested basis. That is not brilliant news but it is better than nothing. That was until today when I received a letter saying, that despite them already paying me benefit they had questions over how my last job ended and so might not only cut off my benefit but want what they have paid (£65 per week for two weeks) repaid.
Now, I have written before how unpleasant my last employers were. See my posting: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/12/sledgehammer-management.html My line manager actively sought out any minor thing to attack me with and when this seemed insufficient this manager began making up things. By the end my line manager was claiming tens of colleagues had complained about me, but when I asked them they had no idea what my line manager was talking about. My line manager made discriminatory comments about me which later unsurprisingly could not recollect. Then this manager went on to fabricate stories to the personnel staff and was bent on pushing me out. The union representative was incredulous at what he felt was a playground style behaviour and by the end even the personnel manager did not involve my manager in talks. As it was my department was going to be merged with another meaning that there was going two people doing my job, me and another, in the new merged department. So, personnel offered me a deal, voluntary redundancy if I did not make a victimisation claim against my line manager. I got a far better payment than when made redundant from my last company which I had worked for, for over four years. As it has turned out this month I probably would have faced compulsory redundancy anyway.
Now, however, I fear my line manager has not been satisfied with the arrangement and is out to cause me trouble as I sign on. This manager made clear the opinion that I was unsuitable for the post right from the start and kept trying to get me into lower grade posts. I believe the manager had some condition, possibly Asperger's because the manager printed out every email received and underlined individual words. Me getting a settlement is probably galling to my former manager and I fear this is leading to trouble. I suspect a letter has been sent, 'informant letters' as they are termed in the civil service, saying falsely that I was sacked. I hold tight to the letter which outlines the details of the agreement. The trouble is, the decisions are taken far distant from my local job centre and I fear that my benefit will be cut off without me ever getting the chance to counter the vindictiveness of my former manager. In theory if you resign or are sacked from a job you cannot claim benefit for six months. In this case, even when you have made a deal it seems that people can twist it around to rule you out of getting benefit. I both loathe and fear how much power one bitter individual who was prejudiced against me from the first occasion we met and made that very clear, can wield over me even after I am far away from that job. I suppose I should not be surprised that in the neo-Thatcherite era we are living in, as an ordinary person you are going to get hammered by the privilege and they will continue hammering you even when you are far from their site because they loathe anyone who challenges what they seem to believe is the sanctified right to behave how they choose and discriminate just as they feel.
I have long written that I anticipate losing my house to repossession and this certainly seems another step in that direction. I suppose under a regime in which there have been proposals to cut free school meals for the poorest 15% of children in order to pay for the 'free' schools scheme, in fact the freedom for parents to set up schools wherever they choose and only let in the people they like, we should not be surprised that at all levels of society the privileged are stamping down on us in every way they can.
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
The Insidious Lethargy of Being Unemployed
Since I started this blog in May 2007 it seems that I have gone from one crisis to another. Back then I was in my third house in two years and was facing the pressure of a nasty landlord. Having resolved that and the shock of bills from Newham Council and the Inland Revenue for a flat I had bought in London in the 2000s which ate up more than a year's salary, I was looking forward to a period of a little calm in a house that I had jointly bought. Of course, I had not expected redundancy to appear. I suppose I cannot be blamed for not anticipating the recession given that so many apparently skilled economists did not predict it. I was more prescient that them in some ways and in late 2007/early 2008 was saying UK house prices would imminently fall sharply to the scepticism of estate agents who at the time had a shortage of properties to sell (it turned out in the branch of one that the bulk of the photos in the window were of properties that had already been sold) and being hounded by the landlord I had no choice but to buy the house at the peak of prices and get a fixed rate mortgage at what now looks like a madly high level of 5.98%. At that time interest rates were rising sharply and it was better than some rates I could have got. Of course, I did not realise I would be so short of cash that I would not be able to buy my way out of that deal when interest rates fell to levels that previously economists would have said were impossible. My car dying earlier this year did not help.
Anyway, I have characterised my approach to redundancy as like being in a very slow car crash. There were warning signs last August that I picked up on, which is why I attempted suicide. Having failed that, I was faced by the over-optimism of my boss and the woman in my house about my future where I am working. Of course, by February it was confirmed as mistaken optimism. I get redundancy pay of £1400 for four years' work. A friend of mine got £7500 for 21 years' work, so I suppose I cannot complain, but I think you should get a minimum of 1 month's salary. I know companies moan that they cannot afford it, but that is because in the UK they always hang on too long and fritter away the funds they need to lay people off. British workers are cheap, we only get 12 salary payments per year, not the 14 that they get in Belgium and yet companies here still seem incapable of actually factoring in labour costs to any of their calculations and see them as a soft element that they can squeeze. For some reason, their capital expenditure, they feel, is far harder to reduce.
Of course, I have struggling to stave off unemployment, but given the level I have reached, job applications are involved and I have spent coming up to 80 hours and written over 85,000 words in applications in the past four months, to no avail. What I have noticed is with my third failed interview (with no expenses for a round trip of 255 Km; no feedback on the interview either) the lethargy which comes with unemployment is already creeping on me. There is a great deal of weariness from the start on my part as I saw all the pain of unemployment back in the 1980s and hoped that it would never haunt the UK again in my lifetime. In terms of my personal circumstances I am constantly spiralling around all the elements of hindsight trying to find the time and place I should have done something different to avoid ending up here. Ceratinly buying a flat in London, especially in Newham and not selling it the minute I got work outside London was a huge error. The charges Newham Council levied (£14,000) for work to the estate could probably have been avoided if I had bought somewhere different. I should not have trusted the Inland Revenue's initial assessment of my capital gains tax, which was wrong by £10,000. However, even if, through selling the flat immediately I had escaped these charges it would have only lifted my financial burden now (I borrowed money to pay off these sums) and not made my work more settled. Given that I have so few savings because of the loan repayments (and through trying to not get into so much debt using savings rather than larger loans to settle the bills) I probably could financially stand be unemployed for longer than I will be this time, before my house is repossessed. In addition, life has been very spare throughout the past four years, constantly having to cut back. Now it has got to the extent that we are removing light bulbs around the house to cut down on electricity costs, but for the past four years there has been no going out and cheap holidays and now no holidays and a 12-year old car. I do not want the high life, but it has been wearing to have to scrimp for so long now with things clearly now going to get worse still rather than better.
The advertisements on the radio about 'finding your way back to work', as if you have somehow lost your way, not tossed on the scrapheap by greedy employers, emphasises how finding a job is a job in itself. Yet, anyone who is unemployed knows how difficult that is. Your energy and enthusiasm burns up easily especially as an unemployed person you fall immediately into that second-class citizen status 'enjoyed' by tenants, disabled people, etc. People feel they can despise you and look on you as lazy, despite the fact that mass unemployment has been a feature of life in the UK for the past thirty years. Apparently it affects men more than women. In my experience, which is limited, women seem to more miss the things they cannot have because they are unemployed, whereas for men sometimes there is a Spartan appeal about that, 'we can rough it' attitude that actually gives some spark. They say women are more used to shifts in their lives. Even now, the number of men who move house so that their female partner can get a better job are far smaller than the number of women who do the same for their male partners. Motherhood is an immense change that many women experience or have knowledge of through family and friends who have children and they know that it can turn your world upside down. The menopause is another thing that men do not have (or possibly they do, but it is not as apparent, certainly) and yet all women will experience.
Women are the mistresses of change, men prefer stability because with that comes a sense of self and actually self-importance. In an age when men seem obsolete this is even more important than before. The problem for men when losing their job is the associated loss of status and self-respect and I am already feeling that, at times it is an almost physical thing as if someone literally is trying to castrate me, I feel it in my testicles. It seems mad, but it is the truth. Loss of self-respect is immediate and leaves a legacy of fear in you even when you get another job. Employers were worrying last year, that this fear in their workers had subsided too much, they wanted the return of the 'whip of unemployment' and must be delighted that they have got it back.
The cry 'get a job' is not as common as in the 1980s, but the sense that the unemployed person is still unemployed because they are 'not trying hard enough' is an enduring one. It is tiring constantly applying for jobs, lowering your expectations further and further in what you apply for. I accept that people must be 'actively seeking employment' to be entitled to benefit, but they seem to get absolutely no recognition for all the effort they put in unless it leads them into work. Back in the 1990s 24 out of 25 of the applications I submitted did not get me an interview, 125 out of 126 applications did not get me a job. So far 0 out of 20 applications has got me a job. Yet, there is no recognition of the days that have gone into that work. The incessant nature of looking for and applying for jobs is a real burden, then facing taunts from people on top of it is sometimes impossible to cope with. Such things just feed the sense of 'why bother?' and 'there's no point'. If 80 hours of applying can get me no work who is to say 160 hours or 800 hours of applications will. Yet, I have to keep trying despite my mental and physical exhaustion. People seem to expect someone who is being made redundant to work hard (in fact harder because there is so much to tie up) until their very last day. However, that is ridiculous. Putting aside bloody-mindedness at an employer who has snubbed you, there is the exhaustion as you now have two jobs, the one for your employer and the one assigned you very vocally by the government, of finding another job.
I am beginning to think I cannot go through this again and regret failing to kill myself last year. I think I could be clear of yet another round of humiliation and mind-numbing process with no end in sight. Of course I will be chastised by those people who say absolutely absurd things like 'you make your own luck' (I am proof that that is a lie, however hard I work, however many precautions I take thing after thing goes wrong for me in every aspect of my life: house, car, job, relationships, health, holidays, computer, there is not an aspect which is not blighted by bad luck and I would have had to be omnisicent to have foreseen the bad consequences of so many actions which at the time seemed the best option) and that I must work to find work, because it offends them that anyone might find the process exhausting and somehow that is morally bankrupt in their eyes. Looking back at my story 'Technido', I am sickened to think that once again we are going through all of this rubbish we had in the 1980s once more. So I drag myself through yet more applications and beg people to be more understanding about just how unpleasant, how tiring and soul-sapping it is to be unemployed. It is not our fault, go and moan at the employers who laid us off, shout at them 'get a conscience', rather than making our lives more unpleasant by portraying us as lazy pariahs.
Anyway, I have characterised my approach to redundancy as like being in a very slow car crash. There were warning signs last August that I picked up on, which is why I attempted suicide. Having failed that, I was faced by the over-optimism of my boss and the woman in my house about my future where I am working. Of course, by February it was confirmed as mistaken optimism. I get redundancy pay of £1400 for four years' work. A friend of mine got £7500 for 21 years' work, so I suppose I cannot complain, but I think you should get a minimum of 1 month's salary. I know companies moan that they cannot afford it, but that is because in the UK they always hang on too long and fritter away the funds they need to lay people off. British workers are cheap, we only get 12 salary payments per year, not the 14 that they get in Belgium and yet companies here still seem incapable of actually factoring in labour costs to any of their calculations and see them as a soft element that they can squeeze. For some reason, their capital expenditure, they feel, is far harder to reduce.
Of course, I have struggling to stave off unemployment, but given the level I have reached, job applications are involved and I have spent coming up to 80 hours and written over 85,000 words in applications in the past four months, to no avail. What I have noticed is with my third failed interview (with no expenses for a round trip of 255 Km; no feedback on the interview either) the lethargy which comes with unemployment is already creeping on me. There is a great deal of weariness from the start on my part as I saw all the pain of unemployment back in the 1980s and hoped that it would never haunt the UK again in my lifetime. In terms of my personal circumstances I am constantly spiralling around all the elements of hindsight trying to find the time and place I should have done something different to avoid ending up here. Ceratinly buying a flat in London, especially in Newham and not selling it the minute I got work outside London was a huge error. The charges Newham Council levied (£14,000) for work to the estate could probably have been avoided if I had bought somewhere different. I should not have trusted the Inland Revenue's initial assessment of my capital gains tax, which was wrong by £10,000. However, even if, through selling the flat immediately I had escaped these charges it would have only lifted my financial burden now (I borrowed money to pay off these sums) and not made my work more settled. Given that I have so few savings because of the loan repayments (and through trying to not get into so much debt using savings rather than larger loans to settle the bills) I probably could financially stand be unemployed for longer than I will be this time, before my house is repossessed. In addition, life has been very spare throughout the past four years, constantly having to cut back. Now it has got to the extent that we are removing light bulbs around the house to cut down on electricity costs, but for the past four years there has been no going out and cheap holidays and now no holidays and a 12-year old car. I do not want the high life, but it has been wearing to have to scrimp for so long now with things clearly now going to get worse still rather than better.
The advertisements on the radio about 'finding your way back to work', as if you have somehow lost your way, not tossed on the scrapheap by greedy employers, emphasises how finding a job is a job in itself. Yet, anyone who is unemployed knows how difficult that is. Your energy and enthusiasm burns up easily especially as an unemployed person you fall immediately into that second-class citizen status 'enjoyed' by tenants, disabled people, etc. People feel they can despise you and look on you as lazy, despite the fact that mass unemployment has been a feature of life in the UK for the past thirty years. Apparently it affects men more than women. In my experience, which is limited, women seem to more miss the things they cannot have because they are unemployed, whereas for men sometimes there is a Spartan appeal about that, 'we can rough it' attitude that actually gives some spark. They say women are more used to shifts in their lives. Even now, the number of men who move house so that their female partner can get a better job are far smaller than the number of women who do the same for their male partners. Motherhood is an immense change that many women experience or have knowledge of through family and friends who have children and they know that it can turn your world upside down. The menopause is another thing that men do not have (or possibly they do, but it is not as apparent, certainly) and yet all women will experience.
Women are the mistresses of change, men prefer stability because with that comes a sense of self and actually self-importance. In an age when men seem obsolete this is even more important than before. The problem for men when losing their job is the associated loss of status and self-respect and I am already feeling that, at times it is an almost physical thing as if someone literally is trying to castrate me, I feel it in my testicles. It seems mad, but it is the truth. Loss of self-respect is immediate and leaves a legacy of fear in you even when you get another job. Employers were worrying last year, that this fear in their workers had subsided too much, they wanted the return of the 'whip of unemployment' and must be delighted that they have got it back.
The cry 'get a job' is not as common as in the 1980s, but the sense that the unemployed person is still unemployed because they are 'not trying hard enough' is an enduring one. It is tiring constantly applying for jobs, lowering your expectations further and further in what you apply for. I accept that people must be 'actively seeking employment' to be entitled to benefit, but they seem to get absolutely no recognition for all the effort they put in unless it leads them into work. Back in the 1990s 24 out of 25 of the applications I submitted did not get me an interview, 125 out of 126 applications did not get me a job. So far 0 out of 20 applications has got me a job. Yet, there is no recognition of the days that have gone into that work. The incessant nature of looking for and applying for jobs is a real burden, then facing taunts from people on top of it is sometimes impossible to cope with. Such things just feed the sense of 'why bother?' and 'there's no point'. If 80 hours of applying can get me no work who is to say 160 hours or 800 hours of applications will. Yet, I have to keep trying despite my mental and physical exhaustion. People seem to expect someone who is being made redundant to work hard (in fact harder because there is so much to tie up) until their very last day. However, that is ridiculous. Putting aside bloody-mindedness at an employer who has snubbed you, there is the exhaustion as you now have two jobs, the one for your employer and the one assigned you very vocally by the government, of finding another job.
I am beginning to think I cannot go through this again and regret failing to kill myself last year. I think I could be clear of yet another round of humiliation and mind-numbing process with no end in sight. Of course I will be chastised by those people who say absolutely absurd things like 'you make your own luck' (I am proof that that is a lie, however hard I work, however many precautions I take thing after thing goes wrong for me in every aspect of my life: house, car, job, relationships, health, holidays, computer, there is not an aspect which is not blighted by bad luck and I would have had to be omnisicent to have foreseen the bad consequences of so many actions which at the time seemed the best option) and that I must work to find work, because it offends them that anyone might find the process exhausting and somehow that is morally bankrupt in their eyes. Looking back at my story 'Technido', I am sickened to think that once again we are going through all of this rubbish we had in the 1980s once more. So I drag myself through yet more applications and beg people to be more understanding about just how unpleasant, how tiring and soul-sapping it is to be unemployed. It is not our fault, go and moan at the employers who laid us off, shout at them 'get a conscience', rather than making our lives more unpleasant by portraying us as lazy pariahs.
Saturday, 10 May 2008
Property in the UK 9: My First Steps to Losing My House
I suppose it was inevitable. I had expected house prices to begin falling this year, but I had not expected oil prices to rise. I had expected Iraq to stabilise and for more oil to be coming from there, I did not realise that Chinese consumption was going to step up so suddenly, forcing prices higher and higher and in turn both petrol and oil prices. Anyway, consequently with petrol having risen by 30p per litre in the past year and food costs for me by about 20% in the same period, I suddenly found this month that all my salary had been spent by the first week in May. Myself and the woman in the house sat down to see where we could all cut back. Her online business has collapsed as other people not only in the UK (she sells in Europe, USA and to expatriates in China) have stopped buying anything they see as frivolous. This means she will have to go out to work (something she loathes, she feels people despise her and patronise her when she is an employee which is why she always tries to be self-employed). She pointed out I was spending £32 (€40; US$62) per month on coffee at work. I have also stopped doing the lottery at £8 per month and cancelled both house contents and life insurance saving about another £80 (€100; US$156) per month. We also had a cleaner at £64 per month which we are laying off, so altogether we reckon we can save £183 per month which is enough to cover my petrol bill or about three-quarters of the monthly groceries. This means we do not have to sell the house we have been in for just under five months.
We have a fixed rate mortgage for five years, but got it when the interest rates were at their peak. House prices have slid constantly since then and we think we over-paid for this house anyway so if we sell we will have lost probably at least £20,000 (€25,200; US$39,200) on what we paid for it. Also British people dislike quirky decor in their houses so the Victorian style interiors that came with it (and of course we cannot afford to change now) will make it as hard for us to sell as it was for our predecessors here. Also the market is being flooded by people trying to dump houses that like us they can no longer afford to pay for. In addition, many people who bought buy-to-let properties are now dumping these even though they do not live in them. Repossessions by banks of houses on which people are no longer able to pay their mortgage have risen by 17% so far this year and the estimated figure is 45,000 in 2008 compared to 27,000 in 2007. We are not back to the level of the 1990s, the peak was over 80,000 reposessions in 1991, but there seems nothing to stop this climb. In addition, the mass year-on-year repossessions of the early 1990s put cheap property on to the market whereas since the early 2000s bank policies have changed and they keep repossessed property and set a high price and wait until the market rises back up to it so that they get more money back than auctioning off at a low price as they did in the 1990s.
For now, 'tightening our belts' should mean we do not get into danger over the mortgage. It does mean all luxuries have gone, no more meals out, no holidays (those we had, I realise now were foolish), no more DVDs or electrical goods. It is hard to explain to the 6-year old in our house why these things have stopp. My fear is that costs will rise further and that in the future having taken up all the slack in our finances there will be nothing left to economise on. We only need the car to go wrong or one of us to need dental treatment for it to soak up all the meagre savings we have left and us like an increasing number of house owners to begin the path to losing the house and all the money we put into it.
With hindsight we could have done things differently: bought a cheaper house, moved to a cheaper town (certainly one closer to where I work), continued renting, but of course our options were limited with two landlords in a row mistreating us, forcing us to move on as quickly as we could into what have turned out to be bad houses for us. My prediction is that by May 2009 I will have lost this house and with it all the money I saved and invested through the 2000s in that flat in London (where I was also shafted). In the UK of today you do not only have to be clever with money (which I am clearly not) but you have to be very, very lucky. I earn 50% per year more than the national average salary, so I am not losing my house just yet, but my contract expires in August 2009 and with people already being made redundant by my company it is clear I have no future there as they always simply do not renew the contracts of fixed-term staff like me. I have lived through the very nasty unemployment of the 1980s and the house fiasco of 1990-3 during which so many people suffered terribly and yet I managed to escape by being flexible and not investing in anything. As you get older though humans naturally crave stability, but in the UK though we are encouraged very hard to buy houses, doing that just makes you vulnerable to the economic turmoil that seems to buffet us so regularly and then the people who urged you to buy a house are totally unsympathetic when you are kicked out. The bulk of us are simply hard workers, not successful gamblers and yet we are forced by British society and its economy to constantly gamble with our future.
As I told the 6-year old, not getting some things he wants now may help his mother hang on to this house, but I think more likely is the outcome I threatened him with that in a few months he will no longer have a bedroom of his own, not have a garden and many of the electrical goods now in the house will have gone. That is his future and most likely the one of many hundreds of thousands of British families, just because greedy American bankers could not be content with the mortgage market they had.
We have a fixed rate mortgage for five years, but got it when the interest rates were at their peak. House prices have slid constantly since then and we think we over-paid for this house anyway so if we sell we will have lost probably at least £20,000 (€25,200; US$39,200) on what we paid for it. Also British people dislike quirky decor in their houses so the Victorian style interiors that came with it (and of course we cannot afford to change now) will make it as hard for us to sell as it was for our predecessors here. Also the market is being flooded by people trying to dump houses that like us they can no longer afford to pay for. In addition, many people who bought buy-to-let properties are now dumping these even though they do not live in them. Repossessions by banks of houses on which people are no longer able to pay their mortgage have risen by 17% so far this year and the estimated figure is 45,000 in 2008 compared to 27,000 in 2007. We are not back to the level of the 1990s, the peak was over 80,000 reposessions in 1991, but there seems nothing to stop this climb. In addition, the mass year-on-year repossessions of the early 1990s put cheap property on to the market whereas since the early 2000s bank policies have changed and they keep repossessed property and set a high price and wait until the market rises back up to it so that they get more money back than auctioning off at a low price as they did in the 1990s.
For now, 'tightening our belts' should mean we do not get into danger over the mortgage. It does mean all luxuries have gone, no more meals out, no holidays (those we had, I realise now were foolish), no more DVDs or electrical goods. It is hard to explain to the 6-year old in our house why these things have stopp. My fear is that costs will rise further and that in the future having taken up all the slack in our finances there will be nothing left to economise on. We only need the car to go wrong or one of us to need dental treatment for it to soak up all the meagre savings we have left and us like an increasing number of house owners to begin the path to losing the house and all the money we put into it.
With hindsight we could have done things differently: bought a cheaper house, moved to a cheaper town (certainly one closer to where I work), continued renting, but of course our options were limited with two landlords in a row mistreating us, forcing us to move on as quickly as we could into what have turned out to be bad houses for us. My prediction is that by May 2009 I will have lost this house and with it all the money I saved and invested through the 2000s in that flat in London (where I was also shafted). In the UK of today you do not only have to be clever with money (which I am clearly not) but you have to be very, very lucky. I earn 50% per year more than the national average salary, so I am not losing my house just yet, but my contract expires in August 2009 and with people already being made redundant by my company it is clear I have no future there as they always simply do not renew the contracts of fixed-term staff like me. I have lived through the very nasty unemployment of the 1980s and the house fiasco of 1990-3 during which so many people suffered terribly and yet I managed to escape by being flexible and not investing in anything. As you get older though humans naturally crave stability, but in the UK though we are encouraged very hard to buy houses, doing that just makes you vulnerable to the economic turmoil that seems to buffet us so regularly and then the people who urged you to buy a house are totally unsympathetic when you are kicked out. The bulk of us are simply hard workers, not successful gamblers and yet we are forced by British society and its economy to constantly gamble with our future.
As I told the 6-year old, not getting some things he wants now may help his mother hang on to this house, but I think more likely is the outcome I threatened him with that in a few months he will no longer have a bedroom of his own, not have a garden and many of the electrical goods now in the house will have gone. That is his future and most likely the one of many hundreds of thousands of British families, just because greedy American bankers could not be content with the mortgage market they had.
Friday, 7 March 2008
The Trouble After Suicide Fails Is That You Still Have To Face Life
One reason why I have not been blogging much recently is because I have been facing pressures: severe ill-health during my first holiday since 2005 and now bad news about my employment prospects. I suppose I should have not expected any more. In this age we should expect to have to have twenty plus jobs in our lives. I have been fortunate that at a time when 2 year contracts or less are the norm, my last job went on for 4.5 years and this one will reach 4 years too if I complete the latest contract in August 2009. For a man in his twenties, two years is probably enough in a post, but as I age it gets harder, exacerbated by having to move across England and then move house twice more during the 2 years 7 months that I have had this current job. Anyway, yesterday it was revealed to us that the company had found out it was doing worse than it thought and was looking at cutting jobs. Of course the high ups will be unaffected they always are and will not even see a pay cut. The most vulnerable are people like me, the contract workers. They do not need to pay redundancy money they just do not re-employ us. This means another move and now of course I have to sell the house (the value of which is falling) which could easily take 5 months or more given it took 7 months to get in here. My industry is not one with jobs everywhere so I will be back on the road again. The longest I have spent in one town was 6 years in London and it looks like the average is about 4 years. Anyway, I just could not face the uncertainty, the need to keep on applying for jobs (I usually get 1 interview for every 25 applications I make and 1 job for every 125 applications, that is hours and hours of filling in forms) all made worse by now being over 40 (my insurance companies keep telling me this fact and why it means my premiums have to rise).
You will not be surprised to find that all of this simply made me tired with life and I began taking an overdose of prescription medicine last night. Of course I bottled it (for non-UK readers, I lost the courage to finish it off), I made the mistake of not getting drunk first and having watched a particularly bleak episode of the science fiction series 'Torchwood' this week about a man brought back to life, I became terrified of what lurked waiting for me beyond life. Initially it had felt really relaxing and I had no desire to write a note or anything, just to get away from all the stuff piling on my head. Today I feel incredibly cowardly that I am still here, extremely weak in terms of my resolve and so rather than yesterday when I felt courageous I now despise myself even more. I do feel rather numb which is quite a good sensation because the big problem of failing to kill yourself is that you still have to face up to all the rubbish you were trying to leave behind and that is where I am now, but the fear of unemployment and the house respossession that would inevitably fail, the need to throw away so many of my possessions so I could fit into a flat I could afford and give up what I have accumulated in my life, is dulled now, though of course it has not gone away and is still to be faced.
They say unemployment has fallen from the 4 million out of work of the 1980s down to somewhere like 1.6 million people these days. However, I think there is a lot of missing unemployment, unreported and also for people like me, underemployment in the sense that my next job is unlikely to pay sufficient to keep the house. How foolish I was to fall for the pressure and the lure of buying the house, and how incredibly quickly (it is just over 3 months since we moved in) that it is all coming apart. This is my moment of being truly middle class, it is likely to expire in 17 months if not sooner. Men are obsolete, the new jobs being created are low paid and unappealing. What a waste of government money all my education was in that it cannot keep me in a decent job and in my house. I should have simply left school at 16 and I would be in no different position now. I would probably have had fewer experiences, but so many of them have been about stress and pressure, I would have given up the bulk of them. I can see why the suicide rate among young men in the UK is so high, there is nothing to live for. If you are lucky you will get a decent life for a few years, but then it will evaporate sooner or later and certainly when you retire if not before. How dare people try to stop young men exiting the so bleak existence that lies before the bulk of them.
This was another point which angered me. My housemate got angry that I would kill myself in my own house with a 6-year old living here. For a start I reserve the right to kill myself in my own house and no-one is going to stop that. Second, I have ended up as de facto father figure to this child (you cannot avoid it, beware of this two adults plus child, no matter what the relationship, end up being perceived as the parents no matter how badly qualified one or other is for the role. I imagine it even applies with two people of the same sex living in the house but it is even easier if you are a different gender to the real parent) and apparently that means I cannot kill myself. That is ridiculous, the strongest woman I ever knew had had both her father and uncle kill themselves and it made her outward going and intelligent and incredibly well travelled. The reason behind this is because children who come from two-parent families are too weak to live in this modern world. Only children from single parent families stand any chance these days. They are not pandered to and early on they learn to be tough and resourceful. If I had not been brought up by two parents I am sure I could cope far better with the situations I am facing. It is rubbish to say families need fathers; two parent families are unsuitable for western society in the twenty-first century and that 6-year old would be better off without some pretend father.
So where does this leave me now? Well, I guess the numbness will wear off and the fear of the future will return. Also massive regret over so many things I have done wrong. Every decision I seem to have made since 2005 has been a big error. Leaving my old permanent post for a contract job in more expensive region of the UK was a major mistake especially as they reneged on three-quarters of the relocation expenses I had been promised. The second thing was not to downsize immediately and try to keep the space I had previously enjoyed, that is impossible in South-East England. I picked two wrong houses to rent. They initially seemed good but the behaviour of the landlords cut the ground from beneath me and costs thousands of pounds in moving and moving again let alone a lot of stress. Of course the house purchase was handled very poorly, getting so little for my London flat, paying so much for this house and getting a fixed-rate mortgage when interest rates were at their peak. Done differently I could have got £5-10,000 more out of the deal and not eaten up all my savings for a house I will not see two years in and that money could have tided me over the period of unemployment that is coming up. I have been a fool at every turn.
As you can tell given that nothing has changed in the circumstances that led to me trying to take my own life (something I can never get right, I tried to hang myself at the age of 22 and the hook to which the rope was tied broke dropping me to the floor) remains. Next time I am going to get a lot of alcohol to keep the frights away as I do it and I am going to make sure that I have far far more medicines so that there is no chance I will come back simply with a headache. Then the government can simply continue its authoritarian steps (still trying to push for 42 days detention without charge and now rushing through identity cards for all foreign nationals in the UK, a cynical ploy as the libertarian right are strongly against identity cards but they hate immigrants even more) without me.
You will not be surprised to find that all of this simply made me tired with life and I began taking an overdose of prescription medicine last night. Of course I bottled it (for non-UK readers, I lost the courage to finish it off), I made the mistake of not getting drunk first and having watched a particularly bleak episode of the science fiction series 'Torchwood' this week about a man brought back to life, I became terrified of what lurked waiting for me beyond life. Initially it had felt really relaxing and I had no desire to write a note or anything, just to get away from all the stuff piling on my head. Today I feel incredibly cowardly that I am still here, extremely weak in terms of my resolve and so rather than yesterday when I felt courageous I now despise myself even more. I do feel rather numb which is quite a good sensation because the big problem of failing to kill yourself is that you still have to face up to all the rubbish you were trying to leave behind and that is where I am now, but the fear of unemployment and the house respossession that would inevitably fail, the need to throw away so many of my possessions so I could fit into a flat I could afford and give up what I have accumulated in my life, is dulled now, though of course it has not gone away and is still to be faced.
They say unemployment has fallen from the 4 million out of work of the 1980s down to somewhere like 1.6 million people these days. However, I think there is a lot of missing unemployment, unreported and also for people like me, underemployment in the sense that my next job is unlikely to pay sufficient to keep the house. How foolish I was to fall for the pressure and the lure of buying the house, and how incredibly quickly (it is just over 3 months since we moved in) that it is all coming apart. This is my moment of being truly middle class, it is likely to expire in 17 months if not sooner. Men are obsolete, the new jobs being created are low paid and unappealing. What a waste of government money all my education was in that it cannot keep me in a decent job and in my house. I should have simply left school at 16 and I would be in no different position now. I would probably have had fewer experiences, but so many of them have been about stress and pressure, I would have given up the bulk of them. I can see why the suicide rate among young men in the UK is so high, there is nothing to live for. If you are lucky you will get a decent life for a few years, but then it will evaporate sooner or later and certainly when you retire if not before. How dare people try to stop young men exiting the so bleak existence that lies before the bulk of them.
This was another point which angered me. My housemate got angry that I would kill myself in my own house with a 6-year old living here. For a start I reserve the right to kill myself in my own house and no-one is going to stop that. Second, I have ended up as de facto father figure to this child (you cannot avoid it, beware of this two adults plus child, no matter what the relationship, end up being perceived as the parents no matter how badly qualified one or other is for the role. I imagine it even applies with two people of the same sex living in the house but it is even easier if you are a different gender to the real parent) and apparently that means I cannot kill myself. That is ridiculous, the strongest woman I ever knew had had both her father and uncle kill themselves and it made her outward going and intelligent and incredibly well travelled. The reason behind this is because children who come from two-parent families are too weak to live in this modern world. Only children from single parent families stand any chance these days. They are not pandered to and early on they learn to be tough and resourceful. If I had not been brought up by two parents I am sure I could cope far better with the situations I am facing. It is rubbish to say families need fathers; two parent families are unsuitable for western society in the twenty-first century and that 6-year old would be better off without some pretend father.
So where does this leave me now? Well, I guess the numbness will wear off and the fear of the future will return. Also massive regret over so many things I have done wrong. Every decision I seem to have made since 2005 has been a big error. Leaving my old permanent post for a contract job in more expensive region of the UK was a major mistake especially as they reneged on three-quarters of the relocation expenses I had been promised. The second thing was not to downsize immediately and try to keep the space I had previously enjoyed, that is impossible in South-East England. I picked two wrong houses to rent. They initially seemed good but the behaviour of the landlords cut the ground from beneath me and costs thousands of pounds in moving and moving again let alone a lot of stress. Of course the house purchase was handled very poorly, getting so little for my London flat, paying so much for this house and getting a fixed-rate mortgage when interest rates were at their peak. Done differently I could have got £5-10,000 more out of the deal and not eaten up all my savings for a house I will not see two years in and that money could have tided me over the period of unemployment that is coming up. I have been a fool at every turn.
As you can tell given that nothing has changed in the circumstances that led to me trying to take my own life (something I can never get right, I tried to hang myself at the age of 22 and the hook to which the rope was tied broke dropping me to the floor) remains. Next time I am going to get a lot of alcohol to keep the frights away as I do it and I am going to make sure that I have far far more medicines so that there is no chance I will come back simply with a headache. Then the government can simply continue its authoritarian steps (still trying to push for 42 days detention without charge and now rushing through identity cards for all foreign nationals in the UK, a cynical ploy as the libertarian right are strongly against identity cards but they hate immigrants even more) without me.
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