No way did I "givie up easily." However, there - comes a point when, - sm Posted: Aug 24th, 2016 - 3:51 pm In Reply to: Why give up so easily? - Anonymous
if you are still working as an MT, you have to ask yourself, "Is staying in this profession really worth the anxiety, poor health and/or sedentary lifestyle (14+ hrs. a day at the computer is a pretty darned sedentary life!), low, unpredictable pay, relying on food stamps to eat, lack of healthcare or insurance, and in some cases - threat of losing my home?"
For most people, that answer is a resounding 'NO'. Some are lulled into a false sense of security if they happen to stumble upon an old-school type on-site MT job that still pays a living wage. I know I was. I quit my starvation-wage MTSO job and literally jumped at the chance to work on-site again, even though the commute was 2 hours each way. Unfortunately, like most new hires at the few on-site jobs that are left, I discovered that the position wasn't permanent, as I'd been led to believe. It was only until I and the other new hire had 'trained' their new front-end speech-recognition software. We didn't know that someone else was concurrently training the doctors to use the point-and-click aspect of that software in order to eliminate their entire MT staff.
After getting laid off from that job, there were no more on-site MT jobs left in my half of the entire state. At that point, returning to an at-home MTSO position would have been idiotic.
Fast-forward to our current political situation, and either way that goes, it does not bode well for the American worker. The focus will continue to be on Corporate America and their profit margin. The worker will be a mere afterthought, and that x10 if you happen to be in MT.
To get any government attention at all focused on the MT industry and the plight of its workers would take a Herculean effort, lots of time and money, and strong organization of workers to pull off. Unfortunately, getting a group of MTs to even agree on one point, let alone the number of things they'd have to do in unison to pull off some kind of a change in MT is just not possible. Add to that the fact that most of us don't know each other personally, and haven't even met our supervisors or company owners in person, and that we're scattered far and wide across the country, and you've got ZERO CHANCE of making any positive changes in MT as a viable profession. That would take time, energy and money that frankly, most of us don't have.
Also, because of its many years of being considered a dead-end job, fewer and fewer young people are getting into MT. That leaves MTSO's with an aging workforce that (like me) usually chooses to retire early rather than subject themselves to the mental and physical torture of trying to make a living as an at-home MT.
Newbies with new MT skills and high aspirations will probably continue to dribble in through the "You, too, can work at home!" MT school pipeline, and like you will believe that something can be done to make a change for the better in MT. But the truth is, most of us old-timers have been trying like he11 to change things for more than a decade now, and it's been fruitless.
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Complete Discussion Below: (  marks the location of current message within thread)
- What can be done? - Anonymous (Views: 1016, 2016-08-23, 5:03 pm)
- At this point, I think the only thing MTs can - realistically do is QUIT. (sm) (Views: 684, 2016-08-23, 5:35 pm)
- That's not the answer - Anonymous (Views: 744, 2016-08-23, 5:58 pm)
- Reality - anonie (Views: 754, 2016-08-23, 6:05 pm)
- Why give up so easily? - Anonymous (Views: 709, 2016-08-23, 6:24 pm)
- No way did I "givie up easily." However, there - comes a point when, - sm
- we need - sm (Views: 701, 2016-08-23, 10:26 pm)
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