Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week October 2, 2016
Posted by Garibaldy in Uncategorized.trackback
Due to dodgy WiFi can’t do this properly this week but here’s a starter that displays an ignorance about Irish economic and social history so astounding it’s hard to fathom
Our generation is perceived by our parents as a load of adult babies who refuse to grow up – when they were my age they had a car, a house, a family. Of course, this is a generation who had access to higher education, all the jobs they needed upon graduation and a housing market that they hadn’t yet destroyed.
From here
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
mind-bogglingly silly stuff all right. I’m prepared to forgive a twetny something writer for believing this crap because they’re young, but presumably the editor who OKed the story is a grown-up who knows that this is total crap, and that the vast majority of their readership will know its total crap.
One bit:
‘Dee (27) says she’s never had a “proper job”. She runs an online business for eco-products: “I started my first business because I wanted money to go on holiday.” While our parents aimed for homes and family, Dee is living the millennial dream. The goalposts have moved’
How many us here had a ‘proper’ job at 27 – one that we still hold today?
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Well I did. I had my son by then and nothing has changed other I’m a little higher up the food chain these days. The idea of taking your entire twenties to “find yourself” is quite frankly a first world style problem and one which is not evenly applied across said first world.
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“Than”
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Well I didn’t. At 27, I was a year away from parenthood, but now, 28 years later i am but three years into the first full time permanent job I’ve ever had. I wasn’t finding myself – still MIA – but my ‘career’ pattern has been pretty similar to the millennial dream/ nightmare. Same with loads of my friends. As usual, the media likes to paint crude pictures but in fact, the precariat has been always with us.
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Capitalism is based on the commodification of labour power; on the precariousness of working class life.
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Point taken on the casualization of labor in fields that may have once been considered (and are still often caricatured) as “cushy”. I just remember that at 22 as an apprentice after a series of unfortunate happenings I was the sole bread winner for my family and reading an article on how 26 was the new 18. I think a lot of people still hew more towards our grandparent’s model of marrying young and getting a job. It’s just that those jobs that would once support a family are dwindling. It’s funny that having hung in there over the recession we are now at a point where I live (and generally across the American southwest) that there is a huge shortage of qualified blue collar workers. And I still see contractors bitching about the unions instead of helping to craft something worthwhile.
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I hadn’t meant to imply that nobody in the past actually stayed in stable employment over decades. But I think the idea that in the past we all left school and walked into steady employment with a DB pension is a little fanciful.
I stumbled through a series of low paid jobs for most of my twenties and a chunk of my thirties. it was for a variety of reasons: few opportunities, little ambition, youthful restlessness. Through good times and bad there has always been some of that.
But that does not suit the Sindo agenda. They want the idea of stable well paid employment to be dismissed as an old fashioned idea, beloved only by the old and the unimaginative.
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Yes, my own sense and experience isn’t that dissimilar. A range of shorter term jobs in my twenties, a series of longer term jobs subsequently, twelve years in the current one – a record, interspersed by being on the dole, and here I am. Again I feel it is journalists trying to map their work experience onto the rest of society. Doesn’t quite work.
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Having an online job à la Dee is the kind of stuff that dreams are made of for the vast majority of Sindo journalists isn’t it? They wouldn’t do it themselves but sure..
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http://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/ronan-mullen-repeal-turns-to-repulse-in-war-of-weasel-words-35096233.html
Ronan Mullen showing what a horrible miserable fucker he is.
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[…] Can’t quite work out is the author here being entirely serious, it’s certainly a shift from her usual political positions – and btw thanks to the person who forwarded. And yet, there are a range of good points made in it, not least the one about the particularly precarious world of journalism in relation to contracts and so on (which came up here in discussion yesterday). […]
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Our old friend Stephen Collins in the Irish Times on Sat stating that the ‘fundamental’ cause of the crash was that the tax take wasn’t big enough to fund public service pay rises. There was I still thinking that bankers and speculators and regulators had something to do with it, but no, those greedy public servants caused the crash. I think he’s internalised all this rubbish and actually believes it now.
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That’s my abiding memory of the crash. How it was caused by bankers, developers, speculators, captialists and owners – and how when it hit, they managed to blame the people who work in the public service. And they succeeded in making that the the narrative.
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Especially true when you know that the government was running a budget surplus before the big crash in 2006 and 2007
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