A Strategy Meeting Of The Unemployed

September 10th, 2009

The venue

This month’s strategy meeting of the unemployed over-65s is taking place at Mike’s place, a few acres of exotic fruit farm in the foothills. The six of us who are coming all joined the ranks of the unemployed in the last 6 months. We will need some days to formulate an effective anti-unemployment strategy.

Mike

Mike is a former government employee who took early retirement, moved out of the city, bought a small plot and began growing exotic fruits trees. He has been very successful and his smallholding is flourishing. The hot summer is a time of rapid growth and it’s literally a jungle.

The legal visitors

The attendees are a lawyer from the Ministry of Tourism which went straight down the tubes at the start of the recession. He was an instant casualty. Another lawyer is advisor to a large economic corporation. He’s out of a job as well. The third lawyer represented a huge construction outfit for years, made a pile of stocks in the company and retired. He held onto the shares. Enough said. The construction company is no more, the pile of stocks is as useful as wallpaper and our lawyer-hero went directly from retired to unemployed without even passing “Go”.

The non-lawyers

The non-lawyer members of the club are an unemployed clerk from the Social Services and Welfare Department and myself, an unemployed engineer in the private sector. The clerk is furious: “I devoted my entire working life to helping the less fortunate, the unemployed, the needy and the homeless. I make it all the way to the top of the ladder – head clerk – comes a recession and I’m on my backside in the dust in the first round.”

The engineer

Then there’s me. In the 1990’s I was a manager in an engineering company of about 60 employees. Then came the downturn in 2002. The owner closed the company but kept calling on me to help with odd jobs. He paid me for my time and when things picked up a couple of years later, called me back on a part-time basis and I was very happy with the new situation. Now the work has stopped again and I am back in square 1, unemployed and waiting for him to call me.

The project timetable

He has a couple of engineering projects about but none have made it off the drawing board What’s holding things up is the bank who are reluctant to part with any money. We keep asking about progress but the bank is close-mouthed and the answer is slow in coming. “Maybe in October, perhaps November. Maybe you should plan the work for next year.” Doesn’t the bank understand that they are the only customer in town with a construction budget?

We need a strategy

We need a strong, creative and winning strategy that will cover us all. Is it prayer, optimism or will continuous banging on the door bring back the work?

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Economy, Employment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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