Eideard

A laid off paramedic who turned to delivering pizzas to make ends meet is credited with saving the life of a man who went into cardiac arrest just as a pizza was delivered to his door.

Christopher Wuebben, 22, was delivering a pizza late last week to the suburban Denver home of George Linn, when he heard the man’s wife screaming for help, according to Wuebben’s boss, John Keiley.

“Chris told the woman that he was trained in CPR and knew what to do,” Keiley, owner of Johnny’s New York Pizza, said on Tuesday. “He got him on the floor and brought him back to life before the fire department showed up.”

Linn was transported to Swedish Medical Center where he is listed in serious condition in the hospital’s critical care unit, hospital spokeswoman Julie Lonborg told Reuters.

Keiley said Wuebben is a military veteran who recently moved to Colorado after he was laid off from his paramedic job in Illinois. He said Wuebben is not scheduled to work at the pizza restaurant until later in the week, but Keiley may not have his new employee for long. At least one local hospital and a fire department have called to offer Wuebben a job in his chosen field after hearing of his heroics.

Bravo!

With life-saving and supporting skills, maybe this is another one of those government jobs that really should be budgeted, eh?

Financial crisis
Stalled too many customers
CEO no more…

Jonathan Schwartz

George Graber was unemployed for three months this year after the shutdown of a recreational- vehicle plant in Elkhart County, Indiana. Now, he’s building $15,000 travel trailers at startup Heritage One RV.

His job-hunting luck reflects a rebound in RV demand that may signal the end of the worst U.S. recession since World War II. In the last four domestic cycles, Winnebago Industries Inc. and other RV makers foreshadowed the economy’s decline and heralded its recovery, government and trade-group data show.

“The RV industry is always the first in and the first out, and there’s already been a noticeable beginning of it coming out of the current recession,” said Dave Hoefer, 66, an adviser to Earthbound Recreational Vehicles, which was founded this year on the site of another bankrupt maker in Middlebury, Indiana.

Elkhart County builds about half the RVs sold in the U.S., making it the center of a $14 billion domestic market. Evidence of a turnaround is showing up in new companies like Heritage One sprouting from the remains of failed manufacturers, and in no- vacancy signs at a motel favored by RV-hauling truckers…

Sales in July, the latest available, ran at the strongest annual rate since October, according to the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association. By year’s end, those shipments should show their first monthly gain since October 2007, predating the onset of the recession in December of that year…

Showroom visits and consumer-loan approvals now are rising for the first time in more than a year, said Steve Smith, a Heritage One partner who recently drove 5,000 miles through the Midwest and South as part of a company sales call…

Elkhart County needs that kind of news. Located along the Michigan border and home to about 200,000 people, the county has a jobless rate of about 17 percent, the worst in Indiana. President Barack Obama has visited the area three times to talk about economic hardship…

For Graber, 45, who had to sell his pickup for a cheaper model and take other belt-tightening steps after losing his purchasing job at Travel Supreme, the Elkhart recovery can’t come fast enough.

“People I know personally, a couple of them will get back every week now,” he said. “Three months ago, everyone was just down and they weren’t even taking applications.”

RV’s are part of everyday life among grayheads. So, whether you own one – and there are a few in our family – or damned near live full-time in one, you stay in touch with the marketplace and the health of design and sales.

I’m certain my father-in-law will tell me about it. When he gets back down here from Canada with his 5th-wheeler.

Sell lots of apples – not just one at a time on a street corner

Everyone knows the grim news — unemployment in the United States has jumped to 8.5 percent, a 25-year high, and is racing toward double digits. Since November, the nation has lost more than three million jobs. But not everyone knows the brighter side to the equation: deep in the maw of the deepest recession since the Great Depression, millions are still being hired.

So, while 4.8 million workers were laid off or chose to leave their jobs in February, employers across the country hired 4.3 million workers that month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“The best thing you can say about these numbers is it speaks to the dynamism of the U.S. economy, and the net negative number that we all traffic in masks that,” said Robert J. Barbera, chief economist at ITG, a research and trading firm. “Ninety out of 100 people who know the number — 650,000 were lost in February — think that means no one was hired and 650,000 were fired.”

Who is hiring? Hospitals, colleges, discount stores, restaurants and municipal public works departments. I.B.M. is hiring more than 700 people for its new technical services center in Dubuque, Iowa, while the Cleveland Clinic has 500 job openings, not just for nurses but also for pharmacy aides and physical therapists. And after President Obama’s stimulus package kicks into gear, state, local governments and road-building contractors are expected to hire more.

RTFA. Positive, useful information – especially if you’re unemployed or looking for a career change.

When Ben Sims, 57, showed up earlier this year for a job interview at a company in Richardson, Tex., he noticed the hiring manager — several decades his junior — falter upon spotting him in the lobby.

“Her face actually dropped,” said Mr. Sims, who was dressed in a business suit befitting his 25-year career in human resources at I.B.M.

Later, in her office, after several perfunctory questions, the woman told Mr. Sims she did not believe the job would be “suitable” for him. And barely 10 minutes later, she stood to signal that the interview was over.

“I knew very much then it was an age situation,” said Mr. Sims, who has been looking for work since November 2007, a month before the economic downturn began.

The recession’s onslaught has come as Mr. Sims and many others belonging to the baby boom generation remain years from retirement. But unemployed baby boomers, many of whom believed they were still in the prime of their careers, are confronting the grim reality that they face some of the steepest odds of any job seekers in this dismal market.

Workers ages 45 and over form a disproportionate share of the hard-luck recession category, the long-term unemployed — those who have been out of work for six months or longer, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Read the whole article. Unless you’ve experienced discrimination for one reason or another, you don’t get the complete picture. Knowing about social and economic reality, fighting against job decisions grounded in foolishness and fear, you still get an extra measure of pain and despair when it happens to you.

Yup. I had this experience a couple of times before I retired.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

If you’re out of work like Steve Lippe, who was laid off from his job as a salesman in January, you know you already have problems. But looking at the fine print that came with his new unemployment debit card, he became livid.

“A $1.50 [fee] here, a $1.50 there,” he said. “Forty cents for a balance inquiry. Fifty cents to have your card denied. Thirty-five cents to have your account accessed by telephone.”

He was quoting fees listed in a brochure that goes out to every unemployed person in Pennsylvania who chooses to receive benefits via debit card. He was given the option when he filed for jobless payments: Wait 10 days for a check or get the card immediately. Like most of the 925,000 state residents who received unemployment benefits in February in Pennsylvania, he chose the debit card and only then, he says, did he learn about the fees.

“I was outraged by it,” he told CNN. “I was very noisy about it. I just couldn’t believe it. An outrage is just too weak a word. It’s obscene.”

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 30 states offer direct deposit cards to the unemployed. Many of the nation’s biggest banks have contracts with the individual states. JP Morgan Chase, for instance, has contracts with seven states and has pending deals with two others, according to Chase spokesman John T. Murray.

Perish the thought the bloody banks should give people who are out of work a break. If there’s one area where the leading economic powers in this land excel – it’s inhumanity and greed.

Barbour and Jindal
Daylife/AP Photo by John Watson-Riley

U.S. Republicans governors are split over whether to accept all of the money their states stand to receive from a $787 billion economic stimulus plan which President Barack Obama signed last week.

Three governors of southern states have come out against taking part of the money designated to extend unemployment benefits and perhaps for other programs. A handful of others are considering follow suit…

“There is some (stimulus money) we will not take in Mississippi. If we were to take the unemployment insurance reform package that they have, it would cause us to raise taxes on employment when the money runs out, and the money will run out in a couple of years,” said Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, who has often been mentioned as a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2012, have also said they would reject the unemployment funds, which make up a small proportion of the overall package…

Later, speaking to reporters at a National Governors’ Association meeting in Washington, Sanford listed some other monies he did not want, possibly including $42 million for retrofitting state buildings to be more energy efficient.

“We’re looking at other things from a scale standpoint that are frankly irrelevant,” he said.

Now, these are the country club royalists who really own the Republican Party. Nice to see them out in the open for a change.

Janice McFadden’s story hardly stands out. The Pennsylvania woman was laid off in November after working at the same company for nearly 20 years.

But when McFadden talks about the future, she has found some cause for hope. In January, the 43-year-old enrolled in the tuition assistance program at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. The program offers county residents who have been laid off since September 2008 the opportunity to take 12 college credits — usually four courses — for free.

McFadden said the program will allow her to reassess her options while she improves her marketability and salary potential.

She is one of more than 1,100 Pennsylvanians taking tuition-free community college courses as they search for a job. Many are concentrating on new job skills, such as computer programming and accounting, to retrofit their résumés so they can compete in a turbulent job market.

It’s a trend echoed at community colleges across the country. George Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges, said he has heard from 75 college presidents reporting double-digit enrollment increases this semester. “Community colleges are a big part of the solution to this economic downturn,” Boggs said. “We are the institutions that are on the ground bringing these individuals into our institutions and preparing them for a new career.”

Many community colleges have cut or frozen tuition for laid-off workers, established scholarship programs or offered financial assistance to pay for textbooks and transportation costs.

Potential expansion of programs like these were cut from the Stimulus Bill by Republicans.

I won’t take space here to make suggestions to the unemployed about what skills should be polished for the future. You’ll find someone to do that locally. My advice is throw the sleazy bastards out of office who refuse to help you get a job.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

The ranks of the nation’s unemployed are swelling this week.

As President-elect Barack Obama’s team transitions into the federal government, President Bush’s political appointees will be locked out, and in these tough economic times many of them are scrambling to find new jobs. High-ranking White House loyalists have deluged Washington headhunters with pleas for jobs. Corporations and nonprofit organizations have stopped hiring. With the GOP out of power, jobs on Capitol Hill are scant and K Street lobbying firms have trimmed their golden parachutes.

So this is the new reality: Instead of boasting to friends and colleagues of new jobs in goodbye e-mails, many longtime Bush aides have offered home phone numbers and Gmail and Yahoo e-mail addresses as their new contacts.

“For Republicans, the inn is full,” lamented veteran GOP operative Ron Kaufman, a close White House adviser to former president George H.W. Bush and an executive at Dutko Worldwide. “You have lots of folks in the House and Senate on the streets and 3,000 administration appointees on the streets at a time when the job market is shrinking anyways. It’s just not a fun time.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The Church of England has published a prayer to help comfort Britons who lose their jobs in the financial crisis.

“Hear me as I cry out in confusion, help me to think clearly, and calm my soul,” says the “Prayer On Being Made Redundant.”

The church, part of the global Anglican church, also offered a prayer for those who keep their jobs but suffer stress and feelings of guilt when colleagues are fired.

“Who will be next? How will I cope with the increased pressure of work?” asks the “Prayer For Those Remaining In The Workplace.”

As many as 600,000 Britons could lose their jobs this year, a report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development forecast last month.

I remarked the other day about too much tea softening your brain. Too much religion flushes intelligence from your brain altogether.