Hiding The Numbers

  Recession, some say its not happening, some just turn the other cheek, but it is and has been taking place for the last two years at the very least. This article is based off of actual facts and occurrences in one town in middle Tennessee that involves multiple people and has been repeating itself for months now. It goes to show just how far off the unemployment Numbers really are, and to what low levels the government and franchises will go to cover up the actual numbers

  Unemployment here has steadily declined for the last two years. Employed in telecommunications, I watched my line of work disappearas the building industry dried up. I closed my small business, again for lack of employment as a professional painter or pulling any other odd jobs worth holding the license for. Multiple factories linked to the auto industry in the meantime closed, laying off hundreds more and flooding the unemployment office and temporary agencies. A trip to the unemploymentt office quickly became nothing more then a waste of time as friends and friends of relatives there were whisked away before your eyes as you sat there in line and walked out the door with the few jobs available, which on any day for more then eight months amounted to a total of no more then 10-12 jobs a week. Literallytold “There are 400 people FROM AROUND HERE out of work, so your chances are not good to find work” by the woman working the desk at the unemployment office i gave that route up also. Granted, not before i gave that unbelievably rude piece of humanity a taste of what i thought of their cute little “racket”. Well, unemployment was drying up so something had to give, so I proceeded to work the fast food angle. Again not much happening until I passed a Mc D’s hiring for that day only. What happened in the next six weeks still makes me wonder about the legitimacy of all of this.

  I walked through the door and asked for an application, which i was given and told that interviews were being run in the next half hour, so i stuck around and filled out my application while burning time. Amazingly, there really was no interview at all, they hired everyone who was in line with an app. I thought it odd but figured what the hell?, I just needed feasible work. We were held off the payroll for two weeks and finally brought in for orientation and scheduling. Being situated right off of the I-40 interstate, the business stayed quite busy, however at the time the overpass was being restructured, so we were all given very modest schedules with a promise that the next schedule coming out people would receive more hours as they expected quite a pickup. So for the next two to three weeks the bunch of us worked our joke schedules as we waited patiently for real shifts. We were all looking at less than 14 hours a week on a good week and under that generally. Multiple employees, hired around when i was and previously employed were hurting for hours and begging management for more. Everyone received the same empty promises, “We will take care of you next week.” O.K. we would answer and go on about our work. This is where things begin to get foggy. After we were first hired, the store ceased hiring, for a week or so. But then they started hiring again like they were short staffed. Obviously, with a crew full of trained people begging for hours they were being promised and not receiving, this started raising questions. So, several people did exactly that and started pushing harder for more time on the clock. Again, same response from management,”Sure, we will give you more.” We received more…more people to train and less hours then before, to the point people were not being paid enough to pay much more then the gas it cost to travel to and from work. At what point exactly do you throw in the towel? I never passed what i was making on unemployment in six weeks and was not the only one left in that position. Left with not enough gas or money to even finish out my work week I had scheduled, I and others were forced to quit…all the while they just kept on hiring. I began at that time, after several others left including shift managers for the same reasons, to question what in the hell was going on. It almost seemed as if they knew they were forcing people to quit, the result being they could not go back on unemployment. Some will say conspiracy theory, yadda, yadda, yadda.