Recession, Redundancy and Reinvention

I was reading The Economist at the weekend when...

"Hey Lord Loafy", I hear you cry, rather rudely interrupting, "What a shit start to your blog, how about lying and pretending you were drooling at some particularly explicit photos in Playboy magazine instead?"

Ok. Fair point.

I was drooling at some particularly explicit photos in Playboy Magazine at the weekend when a thought broke through and interrupted my mounting sexual excitement. The thought was to do with the current state of the Labour (as in Employment) Market.

Try as I might to concentrate on the gratuitous content in front of me, I couldn't ignore the thought - annoying but true. That thought was that men have been the greatest victims in this recession so far. In terms of jobs lost that is.

Revolutionary thinking from an ex-corporate 'droid, huh? Lord 'Marx' Loafer - that's me!

Look, think about the sectors worst-hit - finance, property, construction, manufacturing. These are sectors where men make up the bulk of the workforce. I should know, I used to work in one of these sectors until my unceremonious ejection three months ago.

Most men got jobs in these sectors thinking that there was a job for life just waiting for them there. All they had to do was turn up to work every day, work reasonably hard and they, and their income would be safe until retirement.

But before these guys knew what was going on, the mood music changed: Boom! Shake The Room suddenly became Bust! Another One Bites the Dust.

Thousands of job losses later, those still employed wonder when it will be their turn. Because although the recession might not be getting any worse, job cuts will continue. I reckon so anyway and so does The Econ-, I mean Playboy magazine.

Men are now having to do what women have had to do for years - learn flexibility. There is no such thing as a career, just a series of jobs to bring in enough money to keep Mr Wolf from the door.

The positive side of all this upheaval is supposed to be that newly-redundant men are able to show off their entrepreneurial acumen and finally do the thing they had always been itching to do, but because they have been a wage slave in an office these last 15-20 years they have never had the chance.

Now, with time on their hands, these men have the chance.

All fine in principle but how many people are truly entrepreneurial?

Probably about 3.5% of the population at best.

But with unemployment sure to hit 10% before things get better, that means that a load (a scientific term for millions) of unemployed people are pretending to be an entrepreneur when in fact they have a silent horror of ever being one - "Entrepreneur? Involves work that, don't it? Can't be arsed with that."

There are lots of ways to dress up redundancy into something more socially acceptable:

"I chose to become a consultant... (although I don't have any contacts)."
"I have this really good idea for a company... (I just can't remember what it is)."
"I wanted to spend more time with the kids... (I'm also a member of a secret masochistic cult)."
"I needed to find myself... (I'm so boring no one else can be bothered with me)."

And I've used them all.

I'm not the only one.

Ask any newly-redundant man how it's going and it's normally, "It's going really, really well. I do a quick workout every morning, then I'm round to the mistress for a sweaty session of kinkiness. Then I check my emails, meet the lads for a liquid lunch before I head down to my trendy start-up office where I employ a blonde nymphomaniac with a pneumatic front. Sometimes I have a threesome there - you know, me, her and the mistress. Business is great too!"

But it's a lie. All of it.

Apart from the checking of the emails.

Nothing doing there apart from Spam, Viagra Ads and Penis Extension offers. Yawn.

So it's back to Playboy Magazine.

Reinvention? Flexibility? Entrepreneurship?

Funk that.

(Final thing - the woman who is featured at the top of blog has lopsided 'body eyes', doesn't she? I don't think I have ever seen that before! I know about lopsided bollocks but body eyes...?

So the reason she is featured is nothing to do with me being even vaguely related to Sid The Sexist, it is that, I am, cough, an investigative journalist and, er, this fact - about the lopsided body eyes - seemed highly newsworthy. Ok?!)