Slightly employed

[cimorene]

I get a little bit more time before unemployment. The board had a meeting and decided they can't afford to just KEEP me without the subsidy, but they offered two months (to the end of October) at 80% of my current hours. I'll just have Mondays off. And they'll advertise the job and hope for applicants, planning for me to train them for two weeks. I'm honestly not sure how likely it is to find someone in that time or what will happen if they don't, but I'm glad to have a little more time. There still don't seem to be any very plausible alternatives that I would actually like - I would prefer to work at a little store, but they are mostly so small in town that they can't hire anyone.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Good luck!!!

[oracne]

Yay for a little more time!

[laurenthemself]

I'm so glad you get the extra time. I just caught up on the situation and that's awful; you'd think they would want to provide the subsidy ongoing to someone who knows what they're doing, rather than retraining a new person every year!

[cimorene]

You might think that, but salary support grants are actually intended to increase the employability of people who have been "long term" unemployed (a couple of years maybe?) by adding stuff to their CVs, in theory, but actually overall it's meant to let companies try them out cheaper, then get impressed and decide to hire them for real. Lots of non profits use them though, because they can't afford a full salary otherwise, and it's not possible for them to hire the same person for real. This is allowed because you can't actually pressure the companies, I guess? So on paper it's just to increase employability, and understandably, not intended to be permanent. Presumably this shorter time span is designed to reduce taking advantage of the grants? But I'm baffled why the government wouldn't just make it impossible to continue serially hiring different people with it if they object to the charity use case - implying, I suppose, that they don't believe the effect on the CV is really positive (Wax says that indeed it doesn't look good, because everyone knows it means you were long-term employed)? I'm not sure how limiting the term to one year is going to help anything, or even save money, because the charity will just try for a different applicant. Whereas if you are learning a job that you didn't have previous experience of, surely one year is much less convincing on your CV than two or three.

[laurenthemself]

I can see why that's a thing that the government would do thinking it was helping people out, and I can see why it also absolutely isn't working how they thought it was going to!

I really hope it does help you in finding something else, but I think that it should be at least a two-year period, to give someone time to learn and also potentially progress within the company.

Thank you for taking the time to explain it all to me, by the way, I appreciate that.

[cimorene]

I'm hoping that too. Maybe a good testimonial could have value even coming from a subsidized job like this, lol. I think they would be enthusiastic overall. I excel at some parts of this work, even though there's definitely an ADHD barrier when it comes to remembering and multi-tasking.

[torachan]

Oh nice!