Also, join the professional societies (Society of Women Engineers, National Society of Black Engineers, etc.). They have awesome resources.

Use your alma mater’s career center.

But there is a class war underway, and as Warren Buffett has been quoted as saying, the rich people are winning it — at least so far.

As for “WHY” rich people do this, I think some people are simply cruel & selfish. But I don’t think this is true for most rich people as a class.

I think the rich are destroying the jobs of the middle class and the poor because this is the logic of how capitalism works, at least in the absence of some countervailing State power, or in the absence of a radical workers’ movement.

Adam Smith, the great economist who first outlined the laws of capitalism, basically explains this in his classic book “The Wealth of Nations.”

What makes some nations wealthier than others, Adam Smith decided, is greater ** labor productivity,** and capitalist societies are better at increasing labor productivity than other societies partly because they give rich people an incentive for investing in labor-saving machinery and other methods (eg the factory system) for squeezing more value per hour out of the average working person.

There are many, many economic advantages to capitalist investments in higher labor productivity, as Adam Smith explains in “The Wealth of Nations.” But one obvious disadvantage is that unless a capitalist economy keeps growing — and growing fast — forever, the unemployment rate is likely to rise over time.

As capitalist investors keep putting money into new techniques for producing more economic value with fewer working people, some of the working people are going to lose their jobs.

What’s more, as “The Wealth of Nations” points out, the “price of labor” or average pay that a person gets from holding a job is like every other price in capitalist society. It’s determined by the laws of supply & demand. The more supply, generally speaking, the lower the price.

Therefore, when unemployment rises because of the capitalist investors putting money into new labor saving machinery — e.g. computers — the average pay people earn is probably going to fall, or at least not rise very fast. When unemployment is high, the potential supply of new workers is high, therefore the “price” they can charge the employers for working is low. Thus the laws of supply & demand dictate that high unemployment usually causes low wages .

To my mind, this explains why rich people can sometimes seem cruel & greedy in terms of their approach to unemployment in a capitalist country like the US. From their perspective, it makes sense to invest in economic “progress” in ways that raise corporate profits, but eliminate jobs.

It also makes sense to keep taxes as low as possible, since who ever wants to pay higher taxes? Therefore many rich people who aren’t especially wicked don’t want the government to help the unemployed, since this could raise the rich people’s taxes.

Finally, for rich investors and corporate CEOs alike, a certain amount of unemployment is actually a good thing, since it reduces the cost of labor, and thus normally increases corporate profits.

For all these reasons, I think most rich people are led by considerations of personal economic interest to support government & corporate policies that are destructive to the unemployed.

Out of economic self interest, the rich invest in higher labor productivity that destroys jobs. Out of economic self-interest, they also want unemployment to be fairly high, since this drives down wages & corporate labor costs and increases the dividends that companies can pay to investors.

And out of economic self-interest again, rich people want the government to abandon the unemployed, or at least not help therm much, since helping the jobless will increase the cost of government and possibly result in the State taxing the wealthy to make up the difference.

But most rich people involved in hurting the unemployed in these 3 ways aren’t consciously aware they’re doing it, I think. They consciously or subsciously are hiding what they’re doing from themselves.

I think most individual rich people are a lot like meat eaters (myself included) who love the taste of fried chicken, but never think about the poultry industry from a chicken’s perspective.

If you’re wealthy, and you know that low wages, high unemployment and conservative economic policies are keeping you that way, you don’t think seriously about how these things affect the poor & unemployed. Why should you worry about that negative & depressing stuff, when you’re doing so well personally?

there will not be enough billionaires to sustain Apple and Ipod when that happens

MP expenses anyone? Biggest scroungers afloat!

And they not just got lots of people sacked – they run the country!

I don’t understand the people who say “get a better job” though. If it was that easy, wouldn’t we all have great jobs?

After glancing over some of these answers, I have to wonder how much some people really are basing their answers on reality. Am I the only person who’s seen companies make cutbacks before? Who do you think is in control of that? Government policies can help that along sometimes but don’t kid yourself, it’s usually done for the best benefit of the people/person in charge.