Article Relations: How the Job market has changed.

The main thing these three articles, "The Social Network as a Career Safety Net," "A Company Computer and Questions about E-mail Privacy," and "An Introduction to the Information Age," have in common is an explanation of how the job market all over the world has been rapidly changing. All three articles bring up very different points that all prove how diffucult the world of employment has become.

In Wednesday's class we discussed the decline of unions and labour organizations that protect workers in the information age due to the social polarization and exclusion that comes with globalization, business networking, and the individualization of the worker. This causes problems because the worker is left to their own devices in relation to the job market and their own relationship to their company. In "A Company Computer and Questions about E-mail Privacy," a man named Scott Sidell is fired from his job and accusses his company of reading his personal emails. Apparently, companies are allowed to monitor their emplyee's email communication when they are using a company computer, but they are not supposed to be able to access their emplyee's personal email accounts. The laws for these issues are still evolving, but in the past where a labour union could protect a worker and demand certain rights, the present day situation has a more gray area. Mr. Sidell was in the process of suing his old company, and his case was raising new issues concerning the relationships between companies and their employees. Another comment in class made was statistic of the number of jobs people will now have in their lifetime, between seven and fourteen. It's going to be harder for a worker to gain any sort of power or rights when they are only working at a company for a limited amount of time.
Which leads us to the discussion of flexi-workers. Flexi-workers represent the individualizaton of work, because they will not stay at the same company for long, which is a good tactic in today's world with statistics like seven to fourteen jobs per career. And a useful tool for these flexi-workers, and workers of the information age, is their social network. Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are becoming very popular for workers because of the instability of our economy and the individualization of work as we discussed before. These sites allow workers to connect with people who can help them get a job or find a new one, and stay in touch with people around the world. But as Castell mentioned in "An Introduction to the Information Age," this networking stabilizes the global economy, but only for those who can afford it, and ignores the common unskilled laborer.
These three articles are extremely informative and illustrate a decent picture of what the global job market is currently like and what it will probably look like for the next few decades, however frightening that may be to college undergraduates who will be looking for jobs in a few years to come.