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Holistic Junction's Featured School of the Week: Center for Vital Living
Recent High School Graduate? Seeking an extraordinary school in which to enroll? Holistic Junction is delighted to present the Center for Vital Living as the featured school of the week. The Center for Vital Living has the belief that ...
How to Success On The Job from Job Hunting to Keep Your Job and Get Most of Out of It
INTRODUCTION This article will prepare you for the difficult task of job hunting. Not only will it show you how to get a job but it will show you how to keep your job and get the most out of it. You will be able to use the most modern...
Jobless in July
There is really nothing worse than being jobless in July, except perhaps being jobless in January during a snow storm in Cook County, Minnesota. News reports about the economy trying to make a come back are no encouragement to someone looking for...
Local Job Search - Tips For Success
Tips for a Successful Local Job Search
If you are seriously searching for a local job, but you have no
idea where to look, you may be just one of the thousands of
unemployed people in the country. However, finding a job is easy
when you...
Search Engines and Open Source, Primed to Take-Over Online Recruitment Game
Not too long ago, job boards like Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs were primed to put newspapers out of business. Surprisingly, now it seems that search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! are set to dethrone both newspapers and job sites. As...
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The Night Worker
In the process of musing about our perennially awake world for my Social Psych blog, I started to think about our present work world and how its operations have changed the lives of millions of workers.
I manage a 24/7 emergency crew (mental health). We handle callers from early evening until 7 AM, plus weekends and holidays. During the course of the night, we talk to hundreds of people from all walks of life. Until a few years ago (except for intermittent wartime production requirements), the people who worked through the night were limited to emergency services (police, fire, hospitals), the telephone company, a few booming manufacturing plants, and the military. Now we expect to order items, day or night, by telephone. We demand that support services for all our transactions be available 24/7.
How do night workers cope? For some, night work is a blessing, freeing up daytime hours for childcare or school. For those with limited skills and reduced income potential, moonlighting at night is a chance to earn a decent income. But night workers also pay a price: they never get quite as much sleep as their daytime compatriots. There is always so much more to get done during the business day and they receive constant interruptions from a world operating on an opposite schedule. After a period of time, they either adapt or quit.
Studies have shown that night workers suffer more injuries, make more errors, and experience more medical problems than do first shift employees. Those figures suggest that we function more efficiently in the historical tradition of sunup to sundown. We are not, by nature, nocturnal creatures.
The most difficult schedule to absorb, though, is one that undergoes frequent change.
In some companies, shifts change monthly. I worked with a large manufacturing company years ago (a lot of their employees suffered injuries and needed my services), that held weekly seniority bids on all frontline positions. This meant that relatively new employees might work days one week, swing the following week, and graveyard the next. When I pointed out a possible connection between these horrible work schedules and the company's accident rate, I was told that the Union refused to allow any changes in the system.
Now unions are supposed to represent the needs of the workers, aren't they? How could they possibly justify the stress they were causing their own members?
I finally figured out (sometimes I'm a little slow!) that their members with seniority liked the system because they could easily change their work hours for a week if something came up or they wanted to avoid working for a particular foreman.
Those who had the luck to get in early had a terrific advantage over the newbies. Like the initial members of pyramid schemes or Multi-Level-Marketing scams, they were on the gravy train. And the newcomers - the recently unemployed, minorities, women, the disabled - were left the dregs to fight over while mired in their constant vulnerability to layoff.
About the Author
Virginia Bola operated a rehabilitation company for 20 years, developing innovative job search techniques for disabled workers, while serving as a Vocational Expert in Administrative, Civil and Workers' Compensation Courts. Author of an interactive and supportive workbook, The Wolf at the Door: An Unemployment Survival Manual, and a monthly ezine, The Worker's Edge, she can be reached at http://www.unemploymentblues.com
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