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| Are you Laid off from an architectural job? |
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| no |
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| Total Votes : 2 |
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adailide
Joined: 26 Jan 2006
Posts: 115
Location: Michigan
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 Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2009 4:09 pm Post subject: Laid off? What's next for the community? |
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Myself like many others in the architecture community am starting another month without work.
Laid off at the end of May I am chasing anything and everything I can, but what is the long-term of this? Personally, 4 of 5 close friends I know in architecture are laid off.
So what is everyone doing to get past this depression in Architecture? Collecting unemployment? Doing sidework? Working in other fields?
I am interested in hearing what others are doing, please respond and let me know your thoughts.
_________________
Adam A. Dailide ad@studio-render.com www.studio-render.com
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WalkerARCHITECTS
Joined: 25 Sep 2007
Posts: 105
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| Posted: Fri Jul 24, 2009 7:30 pm Post subject: laid off never paid off |
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The idea behind employment is for the business owner to make a profit. We can use a dairy farm as a metaphor after some general information as a reality check.
To start the business requires capital, start up money as well as other types of assets like technology and facility. The business must be capitalized by private investors or venture capital or loans from banks. Small business may be started by a single person or partners who provide the initial capital. The only reason for starting a business is to make money.
Employees become necessary when the companies ownership cannot produce the goods sold without labor. Labor and capital are the essential inputs to produce product or services that can be sold in the market place.
When the business is making money and growing in a healthy market place then employees are needed and they can migrate to the best jobs because there is a demand for labor. When the market place is soft employees are not needed and employees cannot easily migrate to better jobs because there is a surplus of labor. As the demand for labor rises so do wages and as the demand for labor falls so do wages. Labor is a market that is driven by supply and demand functions. These functions are typically beyond the control of employees.
Companies lay off employees because they no longer need all the employees they have. The problem is of course that every person in our society needs a job in order to pay for the food, water, shelter, transportation, communications and basic mechanical and electrical utilities essential to surviving in modern cities. Being short changed of these things attends promptly upon being laid off. Our society pretends that the market for labor is strong enough that we do not kill off too many of the employees who are laid off by removing from them the necessities of survival in our modern cities. Every major city in the "free" world has homeless people.
Clearly the concept of human beings as a labor "commodity" instead of human resource "assets" of great value is barbaric. Slaves by any name are still slaves even if not actually owned by a slave master you clearly are owned by the system since you rely upon employment to earn your survival tokens that you need to exchange with others to get the things you need to survive. Without that you die on the street.
So unless you are self sufficient you are dependent. If you are dependent then the system owns you. Most of us working class people in the current civilization and past civilization are dependent upon a slave master, feudal lord or a corporate or other business system, in order to survive. Very few of us ever achieve self sufficiency because the labor market will never embody sufficient earning capacity for more than a small minority of working class persons to achieve self sufficiency. The dollars required to achieve that are simply not embodied in the wage they never will be because of the systems nature.
So small business comes into focus as an attempt by persons we call "entrepreneurs" to escape the systems economic constraints in an effort to achieve self sufficiency.
So for the sake of preserving the owners wealth you have been cast out to fend for yourself. To answer your question, thats what we are all doing!
We were just cows on a dairy farm being milked every day.
The market for milk has dried up.
The dairy farmer gets rid of the older cows first except for a few favorites.
As the milk market gets worse he gets rid of the younger cows.
His best young cows are the future so he needs some of those so he keeps the best ones; the older cows he keeps are needed to stabilize the performance of his herd when the market returns.
The dairy farmer waits until the milk market improves. The farmer loses money and time while in the holding pattern. Sometimes busted all the way back to milk cow!
When, with luck, it improves he acquires new younger cows and increases the size of his herd to the most profitable size.
The cycle of course repeats over time.
In general architects who struggle for years to get licensed almost always get screwed in the end. That is by far the most common career outcome for architects. The joke the bankers on Wall street tell is; "I cannot find a cab! Quick, shut down the construction lending!" |
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