Giving thanks?

It's Black Friday today and I am not feeling it. I looked up my checking account today and my part time stint deposited my pay. I made $579 cleared. Not bad, the only thing is that my whopping $579 was for two weeks of work. At this rate, my annual salary will be somewhere around $16,500. Stark contrast to the $60,000 per year I had made during the last decade.

I think about everything I could have done to prevent my lay-off, but there was little I could have done to prevent it from happening. I even commenced my job search months before the official announcement came that lay-offs were definite. I always felt that although I loved the company I had worked for, the General Counsel was one of the poorest managers I have worked with. Perhaps being severely burned out in working at AIG before its melt down had a much bigger impact on me when in hindsight, there was some serious writing on the wall that my last job was not going to make the five year mark. Basically, when your boss does not have much respect for the profession that you are in, that's a big red flag waving in the wind; the paralegals were never invited to sit on meetings, never invited to participate in weekly legal meetings, budget meetings, and luncheons. The paralegals were pretty much treated on the same level as the maintenance crew. When lay-offs were called for, all three paralegals as well as an entry level attorney were all given the pink slip. But the serious cuts in the legal department could have been avoided.

What angers me the most is that lay-offs could have been prevented if the GC did not over staff her damn department and knew how to delegate. I was fine in handling contracts until the work dried up and when work was drying up, instead of hiring a damn executive assistant, I could have picked up the administrative tasks. The GC also insisted that a junior level attorney was still needed to handle agreements. This guy who was hired as an entry level attorney uprooted his family from the mid-west to accept the position. He lost his job one year latter and three months after buying a new home. The compliance manager was also clueless about licensing and pretty much the paralegal who had worked under her took care of everything. So instead of keeping the paralegal who performed nearly 90% of licensing and compliance work and cost the company less salary, the paralegal was cut and the six figure dummy (aka the Compliance Manager) got to keep her job. Instead of keeping me on in handling lower end agreements and administrative tasks, the GC also hired a part time attorney and from my understanding, the record keeping in the department has become very disorganized within the last year (I still keep in touch with my former colleagues).

I go back and forth with my current situation. I do like where I work and with the exception of the incident the other day, the job is not that bad. But I have so many sleepless night worrying about how I can continue to survive in making just $11 per hour at a part time job. Where I work, working full time is considered as a promotion, not just out of necessity. And I worry if I am cut out for the long haul. I take too long to close, I had one confrontation with a customer, and my ends just do not financially meet so far. But there is nothing. My resumes are still being sent and the temp assignments are non-existent. And I am not the only one in this place—about 85% of the store are people who have lost their jobs or have had their hours severely reduced at their primary jobs. I just pray for cooler heads to prevail once the new session in Congress starts, however I am doubtful. I think the US has seen the last of its glory days twenty years ago as a financial super power.