Germans Travel to Poland for Work
THE TELEGRAPH: Unemployed Germans have begun travelling to Poland in search of jobs - in a dramatic reversal of the usual trend for immigrant workers.

Thousands of people from eastern Germany are now commuting across the border into western Poland in an effort to escape the downturn afflicting the region.

The strength of the Polish economy and the weakness of its once all-powerful German peer is behind the change in fortunes.

As many as 2,500 Germans are now registered to work in the region surrounding the north-western city of Szczecin but officials believe the real figure is far higher due to people working on the black market.

While some work in call centres, the construction sector has proved popular, and many workers prefer to go unregistered in order to pocket extra money.

In Uecker Randow, the German district that lies just a stone's throw from Szczecin, unemployment lies close to 20 per cent and the area is blighted by one of Germany's highest rates of long-term unemployment. >>> Matthew Day in Warsaw | Monday, March 22, 2010

Quarter of Adults Out of Work, Official Figures Show
THE TELEGRAPH: More than one in four adults in Britain are not working, after a record number left the workforce in recent months, official figures indicated.

A total of 10.6 million people either did not have a job, or have stopped looking for one, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics, which indicated that more people than ever before had abandoned the workplace – choosing instead to study, go on sick leave or just give up searching for a job.

A record 149,000 left the workforce and became "economically inactive", between November last year and January, the ONS said. These people more than offset the fall in the headline unemployment.

Unemployment fell for the third month in a row, dropping by 33,000 to hit 2.45 million. It has yet to breach the symbolic 2.5 million mark, let alone the 3 million barrier that haunted the recessions of the early 1990s and 1980s.

However, economists immediately expressed caution about the monthly figures from the Office for National Statistics.

The total number of economically inactive hit 8.16 million, the highest since the ONS started recording this measure in 1971.

The number out of a job, or econically inactive totals 10.6 million, or 28 per cent of adults of working age. >>> | Wednesday, March 17, 2010

The New Poor: Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs
THE NEW YORK TIMES: BUENA PARK, Calif. — Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.

Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.

Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.

Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department.

Here in Southern California, Jean Eisen has been without work since she lost her job selling beauty salon equipment more than two years ago. In the several months she has endured with neither a paycheck nor an unemployment check, she has relied on local food banks for her groceries.

She has learned to live without the prescription medications she is supposed to take for high blood pressure and cholesterol. She has become effusively religious — an unexpected turn for this onetime standup comic with X-rated material — finding in Christianity her only form of health insurance.

“I pray for healing,” says Ms. Eisen, 57. “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got to go with what you know.” >>> Peter S. Goodman | Saturday, February 20, 2010

Why Are France Télécom Employees Committing Suicide?
TIMES ONLINE: A spate of suicides at France Télécom, most recently a young woman in Paris, has highlighted the country’s malaise

She sent an e-mail to her father to say that the keys to her flat were in her handbag on the desk and to ask him to feed Frimousse, her cat, and Zébulon, her rabbit. “I’m sorry that you have to receive this sort of message but I’m more than lost,” wrote Stéphanie, who was 32. “Je t’aime, papa”. By the time he read the e-mail she was dead, having thrown herself out of the window on the fourth floor of her office in the latest example of a phenomenon that is often airbrushed out of the clichéd image of France.

Sure, this is le beau pays, the country of wine and gastronomy, of leisurely lunches and stunning scenery, number one for the fourth year running in a recent international quality-of-life survey. But it is also a nation of doubt and anguish, consuming more antidepressants than any other and suffering from one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world.

The reason that Stephanie’s death shone light on to the dark side of the French psyche is that she worked for France Télécom — and that 22 other employees of the telecommunications group have killed themselves over the past 18 months. Most had gone unnoticed outside their home towns. Stéphanie did not. That she was [a] young woman, that she had killed herself in Paris, and that the list of suicides at the company was growing by the month transformed the personal tragedies into a national drama.

Unions accused the company of driving its staff to despair. President Sarkozy demanded action. And Didier Lombard, the chief executive, was forced to apologise for describing the deaths among his personnel as a “fashion”. But amid a frenzied debate, the more thoughtful commentators pointed out that the suicide rate among France Télécom’s 102,000 French employees was 15.3 a year — alarmingly high, but not significantly higher than the national rate of 14.7 for 100,000 people. It is France, not just France Télécom, that is gripped by morbid thoughts.

The French, for instance, are 1.9 times more likely to take their own lives than the Dutch, 2.8 times more likely than the Italians and 2.4 times more likely than the Spanish or the British. There are nations with worse rates — Finland, for example, where the practice is widely blamed on alcoholism, or Japan, which has historically been tolerant of suicide. But in wealthy Western Europe, France stands out, with at least 10,500 people ending their own lives last year.

How did they come to this point in what International Living, the US consultancy, described as “the world’s best country”? There are several possible factors — a sombre strain in French culture; high alcohol consumption; the absence of an organisation as efficient as the Samaritans is in the UK. But the explanation that is most widely voiced concerns the 6,000 people in the 30-to-60 age range who kill themselves every year and focuses on the Gallic relationship with work.

The French may sometimes be portrayed as shirkers, always happy to quit the office or the factory for an apéritif in the garden, but this is to miss an essential component of modern France, according to Christian Baudelot, professor of sociology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris: “The truth is that we are very attached to our jobs. More than almost anywhere else, people define themselves by their professions.” Ask an English builder to describe himself and he might well say that he is a Liverpudlian or a Geordie or a Manchester United supporter, according to Baudelot. “Here, he will say that he is a builder.”

Le travail is the cornerstone of modern France in other ways, too, Baudelot says. “In Italy and Spain, people rely on the family for solidarity. In the UK, there is both a cult of individualism where you are taught to get by on your own and a sort of primal neighbourhood solidarity — in the pub, for instance. France is different. People are taught to get by in groups and it is in the workplace where they seek the solidarity they need. The workplace is the cement of our society.” The cement, however, is cracking as unemployment and globalisation impose a competitive edge to the world of work. … >>> Adam Sage in Paris | Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Mandy Tells Unions: We'll Fight You on Spending Cuts after TUC Chief Predicts 4m Jobless and Riots in the Streets
MAIL ONLINE: Lord Mandelson will today face down union threats of strikes and rioting if there are public spending cuts.

In the most hawkish statement yet from a senior minister on the need for restraint he will say Gordon Brown has decided to stop 'throwing money' at state services.

The Business Secretary, in a major speech, will also insist that the Tories are 'ideologues', hellbent on wrecking the public services.

His intervention comes as union barons raised the spectre of 1980s-style riots if public spending is slashed.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said taking an axe to public services would spark a 'double quick, double dip' recession and push unemployment over four million.

Unemployment could hit 40 per cent in major cities in the North, triggering massive social unrest, he said.

Speaking on the eve of the TUC conference in Liverpool, Mr Barber said: 'Cut the stimulus off and the economy would go into decline again.

'It would take many years before there was any chance of returning to anything like full employment. That would scar for life a whole generation of young people.'

He warned: 'Last time we suffered slash and burn economics we had riots in the streets here.

'I make no prediction that this would happen again, but it would take us back to the days of a deep north-south divide and once again hollow out whole areas of the economy.' >>> Tim Shipman and Kirsty Walker | Monday, September 14, 2009

Is 2009 the New 1929? Current Crisis Shows Uncanny Parallels to Great Depression
SPIEGELONLINE INTERNATIONAL: Is history repeating itself? The current global downturn has many parallels to the Great Depression. And if the current massive bailout packages fail, the effect on the world's economies could be similarly drastic.

The Germans have always had a penchant for looking to America to gain a glimpse into the future.

They marveled at the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. They admired the gray but affordable Commodore personal computer. And they succumbed to the spell of an Internet company with the odd name of Google.

Will the current crisis be as bad as the Great Depression? Photo courtesy of SpiegelOnline International
Now the Germans are looking across the Atlantic once again, but this time they see images that remind them of their own past, images of sad-looking people standing in long lines, hoping for work.

One of them is Michael Sheehan, who worked as an engineer with a large company until February. Not too long ago, Sheehan was the one doing the hiring. Today he is only one of 900 other job-seekers attending a job fair in a depressing hotel ballroom in Philadelphia.

One of the flyers arranged on the tables exhorts the attendees to "Stay Positive." But Sheehan feels more outraged than positive. Someone at the fair asks him for his resume. "I don't have a resume," he says. "I worked at one company for more than 30 years."

Natalie Ingelido, 21, is standing nearby, trying to calm down her bawling two-year-old son, who clearly doesn't like it here. "I'm looking for a job, any job, in a restaurant, a bar, cleaning, whatever," she says.

In the past, says Ingelido, "Help Wanted" signs were plastered on the doors of shops and bars. The past she refers to is last summer, when Natalie and her husband still lived in their own apartment. Now they live with his parents.

Across America, people like Sheehan and Ingelido are standing in lines, waiting and hoping. At one job fair in New York, the line stretched for several city blocks. Many would turn away, embarrassed to be seen there, whenever TV reporters attempted to document their fates.

More than 5 million people in the United States have lost their jobs since the crisis began. As if the country were undergoing fever convulsions, more than 650,000 were catapulted into the streets in the last month alone. >>> By Spiegel Staff | Thursday, April 29, 2009

The Czech Republic Pays for Immigrants to Go Home
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Unemployed Guest Workers and Their Kids Receive Cash and a One-Way Ticket as the Country Fights Joblessness

Prague -- During its manufacturing boom earlier this decade, the Czech Republic wooed immigrants with plentiful jobs and comparatively higher wages. Now the Czech government is paying them to go back home.

Four years ago, Uyanga Ganbold migrated from Mongolia to Plzen, an industrial hub 60 miles south of Prague, with dreams of a European education for her two children. But she lost her job assembling Panasonic televisions and is taking the government's offer of a one-time payment of €750 ($992), triple her monthly wages. "I've never held that much money in my hands all at once," said the petite 34-year-old before leaving in mid-April.

Trin Van Pham is a harder sell. The Vietnamese immigrant lost his factory job with Czech auto maker Skoda in December, but turned down a similar package to leave. "It's just a little bit of money," compared with the $11,000 debt he took on to get here, says Mr. Pham, 30. Besides, he says, "if I go back, I'll also be looking for a job. It's not easy to get one there."

Their reactions underscore the difficulties of unraveling the global work force this once labor-strapped nation created as it grew into a manufacturing hub. In 2007, foreigners scooped up nearly 40% of the new jobs created in the Czech Republic. In the last five years alone, the number of immigrant workers doubled to nearly 362,000 by the end of 2008.

With demand for exports down, unemployment has soared to a two-year high of 7.7%. Economists say the rate could hit 10% by year's end, and there are signs rising joblessness is pushing some Czechs to apply for the low-wage work they once left to foreign laborers. The Czech economy is set to contract by 2% this year -- a sharp fall from a growth peak around 7% in 2006.

In February, the government, fearing crime, homelessness and immigrants overstaying visas, launched a $3 million program to pay newly jobless migrants to go home. The pitch: €500 per legal immigrant, €250 for children under 15, and the cost of the tickets home. >>> By Joellen Perry | Tuesday, April 28, 2009

A Ticking Arab Time Bomb
YNET NEWS: Tighten your seatbelts: Anger expected to explode in Arab world following Ramadan

Soon we will see Arab world rulers boarding private jets and traveling to their colleagues’ lavish palaces for the Iftar – the evening meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan. Mubarak will hop over to Saudi Arabia, Jordan’s King Abdullah will travel to the Emirates, Iraq’s president will also make his way to the Persian Gulf, and the Lebanese leadership will travel to Dubai. This is the source of the money; this is where high politics is being converted to dollars. Interests vis-à-vis charity.

Regular Joes in the Arab world will be able to see the hugs on the red carpet, but the lavish feasts are not to be photographed. This year, more than ever, the sight of tables packed with delicacies and servants wearing white gloves could start a fire among the hundreds of millions of hungry Arabs.

The number of hungry people in the Arab world has reached frightening proportions this year. The month of Ramadan, whose onset coincides with the opening of the school year in Israel and which will end precisely when the Hebrew New Year starts, is standing at the shadow of a deep and dangerous abyss that has emerged between the people on the street and their leaders.

The statistics warn about an overwhelming leap not only in the number of unemployed, but also in the price of food - Bread, rice, legumes, and the nuts and seeds that must be present at the fast-breaking meal. In Turkey, for example, one million “aid packages” will be handed out to struggling families. In Egypt, millionaires and public figures who grew rich via the corrupt ties between capital and government will quiet their conscience by feeding tens of thousands of deprived and unfortunate citizens. A Ticking Arab Time Bomb >>> By Smader Peri | September 4, 2008

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback – USA)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardcover – USA)