Desperate time calls for desperate measure.

Sporting a complete suit, a tie and other corporate gears, a man was seen standing and walking around main streets of Manhattan, New York, with a sandwich board that reads, “Almost homeless.”

It has been 9 months since the man – Paul Nawrocki, lost his job as a Director of Operations at a toy company, Sababa Group and after 9 turbulent months, there’s yet to be an indication he will land a new job.

He has registered with countless number of employment agencies and has mailed his resume to more than one thousand companies. He even subscribed to a fax service that sent his resume out to 7,000 companies in the city. The result – only 3 phone calls.

Sababa went bust in August 2008. And Paul will never have chance to go back to any of his other previous employers, as all of them are no longer in existence. Just like Sababa, they all went bankrupt. To make matter worse, his wife was struck with illness, one after another, and today could barely walk. The couple also has a daughter who is about to finish college.

Paul believes that at 59, he is also being subject to age discrimination as it will be cheaper for the companies to hire fresh graduates or those with less working experience. It is never a good thing when you lose your job in your 50s. Time is running out. The fund is running low on red.

As people were passing, some sympathizers approached the vulnerable looking Paul to give encouragement and hope, while some with hiring power took away his resume as they walked away. A number of others were watching in horror, with the million dollar “will I be next?” question lingering. At one place, he was seen whisked away by a policeman after being told that he standing and walking in a privately owned, busy area.

As more and more citizens starting to notice him, his story quickly become the talk of the town. It even landed Paul interviews with BusinessWeek and BBC.

Last month, Forbes listed the Director of Operations as the 5^th highest paid white-collar job in America behind Commercial Lending Director, Development Officer, General Manager and Engineering Director, but to out-of-job Paul Nawrocki, the list means nothing.

Image: msn.com

Primary care doctors in the US are becoming frustrated with increasing burden of seeing too many patients that some of them are thinking to quit the profession entirely.

Some others, are trying very hard to find ways to reduce the number of patients they see every day, despite the good salary the medical field can offer.

In a nutshell, high pay does not justify them to be part of an overworked bunch.

The conclusion was made after a new research was released in the US yesterday and was done by the Physician’s Foundation, founded in 2003. The report went on to find out that out of 12,000 general practice physicians who responded to the survey, 60% of them apparently did not recommend medicine as one’s career of choice. Close to 80% of them also believed that the country is facing a serious shortage of primary care doctors.

11% respondents are now planning to retire from the field, while another 13% are looking for jobs that come without the element of patient care. 10% of them plan to turn their full time job into part time. One anonymous respondent revealed, “The whole thing has spun out of control. I plan to retire early even though I still love seeing patients. The process has just become too burdensome.”

The reform of the health care is one of the top priorities for the President-elect Barrack Obama, and once in power, he would be needed to entertain the doctor’s groups request to have their workload reduced.

Recent research published by Forbes indicated that medical has the most highest paid jobs in America for the year 2008. The result was so overwhelming that the 9 of the 10 highest paid jobs in the country come from the medical field.

The government’s effort to produce public service workers with higher competency, accountability, professionalism and courtesy looks like going down the drain after it was discovered that the number of complaints received against the public service is on a sharp rise.

The figures, released by the Public Complaints Bureau this week, and published by The Star, saw that the amount of public complaints had more than doubled in the past three years.

Statistics show that in 2005, a number of 2,707 complaints have been recorded, and the figure increased by 25% to 3,397 in 2006. An alarming rise of  57% percent was seen in 2007 with a total of 5,347 complaints recorded.

As for the year 2008, for the first nine months, a new figure, which has reached 6,059 complaints were lodged against a wide range of dissatisfaction including abuse of power, corruption practice, poor service delivery and lack of enforcement initiatives. As the year is coming to an end, the figure can only get worse.

One thing for sure, the growing increase of dissatisfaction against the public service will give rise to more and more questions about what the government has been doing, and will see the relevant authorities taken to task for their failure to improve service.

Banks and financial related companies usually belong to the generous lot when it comes to bonus give-out.

True enough, many of the bank staff will find themselves sometimes working until early in the morning and often put in a predicament where resignation comes drumming to their ears.

But there will be happy faces as the fiscal year edges to an end. When it comes to earnings and profits, banks make most money. And this means, a super high year end bonus in the coffers.

At times, bonus payment can be as much as 10 times of their basic salary, or even more.

But maybe not this year though. With the subprime mortgage crisis and the credit crunch triggered in the US, banks and financial companies became the mostly hit casualties. It pushed Citibank down from the world’s largest bank to 7th in less than 6 months. It hit Lehman Brothers so hard that the company had to file for one of the largest bankruptcies in history. It prompted the US government to rescue the AIG Group through a multi-billion bail out.

Recession looks inevitable.

As the Wall Street continues its downfall, Goldman Sachs, a New York based international bank holding group with major interest in securities, investment banking and investment management, has made up their mind about the bonus pay out for its 7 top executives – they will get nothing. The decision was made even though the company was recently injected with $10 billion by the US government as part of a bail out exercise that included some budget for the company’s executive pay.

Public officials in New York have warned the company, together with other banks rescued by the government, not to use the tax payers’ money unnecessarily to award bonuses to their staff to avoid public backlash. Rumour has also been spreading that the habit of major banks in awarding exuberant amount of bonuses to their executives in the recent years has become a catalyst for catastrophic losses and stimulated the current economy crisis.

With Goldman Sachs’ move, questions are lingering in the air how other banks and financial companies will pay their staff bonuses. Will there be any bonus this year?