This post originally appeared early this morning on my LinkedIn.
At some point last year a guy, whom I will call Dan but he's really Every[wo]man, was made redundant. In the spring of 2023, he joined thousands of workers already out of work, all of them operating in the broad industry known as TECHNOLOGY, across varied functions, from development to talent [where Dan sat]. Normal people like you, maybe. Definitely people like me. Between 2022 and the end of 2024, where we currently are at, 5400 companies worldwide [most of them in the Anglo-American world] made over 600,000 people redundant. How many chances do you think our Dan has to land another job in the middle of that? With every day that passes, but unbeknownst to Dan, those tiny chances are shrinking further.
He is desperate, but nobody hires desperate, yuk, how disgusting, have you no self esteem? He is out of food and accommodation, so he starts a GoFundMe. But nobody hires a beggar, get off my feed immediately! He talks about his plight on LinkedIn. But not even the algorithm likes that, so he gets banned for a while. We cannot cramp the style of the 10-figure grifters on LinkedIn, shut up Dan!
And so Dan, who is scramming to find a home for himself, his wife, his daughter, and his dog, does the obvious: he applies to all the jobs he is qualified to do and to all the jobs he can do, from cutting one's lawn to washing one's windows and car. On the wings of the BE KIND movement, Dan gets insulted when he goes door-to-door and on one occasion even pelted with eggs.
By virtue of being a qualified corporate bod, Dan is now OVERqualified to stack shelves anywhere and immediately DISqualified from those jobs. You see, he is virtually a criminal on bail, a flight risk. If they employ him, he will leg it as soon as a better job comes along, don't you know. But in truth, no job comes along at all, neither the perfect one, nor the imperfect one, not any job in between on the scale of all jobs.
Weeks become almost two years. Dan is now half the size he was as he cannot afford to eat. Food banks close at the weekend, did you know that? Did you know that the Citizen Advice Bureau cannot help? Did you know that social services will send you back to where you came from, even as that is actually the street, because there are no places for people like you, people without an income? How disgusting you are.
This happens to people up and down the UK on a daily basis. Some Dans have burned through THREE YEARS worth of savings because nobody hires someone who is desperate to work. Companies prefer people who don't really NEED jobs, the Machiavellian characters who will end up running the place like a mafia. Nobody wants a worker like Dan, a person who NEEDS to work! What HORROR!
There are thousands of people like Dan who languish on the shitheap courtesy of a redundancy [or the so-called market, same difference really], people who were perfectly suited for their jobs, and more, just yesterday and who today are discarded, invisible, unwanted.
Dan's CV is available at the bottom of the original post on LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stephanella_dan-grays-cv-activity-7274332468965523456-3zlE/