This was dream job for me, in the sense that I've always been lured to the nightlife. I like to party, I love to dance and I especially love to meet folks from diverse backgrounds. I also love learning and I did gain a certain amount of knowledge with the type of industry that I was in while honing my creativity and people-skills in the process.

Unfortunately, the world financial crisis hit a lot of businesses hard, including ours. I was amongst the many that got retrenched from our company. Though I liked my job, I wasn't going to let this put me down. I intended to look at the brighter side of things and see the world half full. I have to say that I was lucky because I still had a month to go to look for a job. I felt privileged to have worked in this business and how it enhanced my skills and upped my confidence. I was glad to know that I was going to be paid for my month's stay despite the fact that I wasn't really going to be working for the most part. This was certainly good news for me. I vowed to start making use of my time wisely and focus on the things that I've always wanted to do. I began to create a masterplan on how to prepare myself from the unexpected turn of events. Though I am not worried at this point, I do not plan to take chances. I know that the universe likes speed so I just need to focus on the type of work that I want to be associated with and everything else will fall into place.

My preparation began by making sure that I accumulate all payments due to me such as my paycheck for the month, commissions, my ITR (income tax return) and seperation pay. I know these things will help me financially, especially when I go and search for a new stable income.

I also began to look into several part-time, homebase or freelance work that is of interest to me or ones that I have experience in. I have noticed that there has been a rapid increase in people becoming interested in finding work online. I must say that I wasn't really surprised seeing the pros of the nature of virtual business industry. Benefits included being able to handle your own time plus the option of selecting different types of work you can choose from. Some of the work online allows you to make use of your skills and others will enable you to do things that cater to your interest. Another plus factor is the potential to earn much more. The reason behind this is because clients online are based mostly overseas and whatever currency compared to a perso seems much better at this point.

Caution is something that should be at the forefront in this type of industry since some might end up as being just a scam or some clients might not pay you at all. So far, when it came to my personal experience, this type of work is pretty ok - meaning I get paid pretty well. Another option for me is to work for companies near my area or those employers who would allow their employees to work from home. This way I get to save money on gas, parking, food, etc.

One trait that serves me well especially at this point is my skill to budget my money. It all started when my mom opened a junior savings account for me and my brother when I was just a kid (and soon after, my little sister followed) and that is how I began the journey of learning to save in case of rainy days. Right now, I use an excel file for everything including my finaces. I list my expenses monthly and from this, i am able to decifer which ones I need to prioritize and which ones I can do away for the meantime. I also believe in balancing everything in life so learning to budget allows me to enjoy my money while being responsible with it.

It is also good to know your prioritizes in life especially with your finances during this time. It is always advisable to pay the essentials first, such as rent if you have your own place and PUBs. Always set aside money for emergencies and try to limit going out and partying, having fun and buying unneccessry stuff. With regards to my credit card, I am trying my best to use it for emergencies only. It has always been a policy of mine to never lose myself in debt so I am trying to let my beloved plastic rest for awhile.

These are just a couple of things that I have been doing for myself to prepare for the unfortunate incident that happened to the company that I am with now. I am constantly reminding myself to keep positive and to never lose heart. I always bear in mind the people who have lost jobs in the previous years and lived to tell their tales - these are people I met in passing, some were mentors and others are good friends. A lof of successful individuals who lost a lot went on to bigger and better things in life. It is liberating to acknowledge that losing your job is never an indication of your worth as a human being - not even the quality of your work. As long as you have the right outlook, you can always utilize this opportunity to rethink about your life as a whole and even determine a new direction that may very well be more gratifying in the long run - both monetarily and personally. So now, I am excited to start another new chapter in my life. In all honesty, I am so ready for the next exciting adventure I am about to plunge into and what the splash of life has to offer. Cheers to the good life!

International trade has mustered a positive fillip from globalization, rapid industrialization, advent of multinational companies and the tenets of outsourcing. For any country that likes to usher into the league of superpower, International trade can be the chief source of monetizing. Imagine a country without the boost-up of import and export. Such a nation would become a closed economy and eventually perish.

International trade is costlier than domestic trading as it has to fill for transport delays, tariff structures like import and export duties and also cover for the legal and linguistic hindrance that another national territory may pose. International trade is much rather restricted to trading in goods and services. It is fundamentally deprived of the mobility to carry capital and labor across the sea hence it refrains from dealing in this aspect.

The principle is simple, rather than dealing in the factors of production, international trade deals in its output; the quintessential goods and services. Land, labor, capital and enterprise create goods and services and international trade uses the last chain of the logistic- the end product.

International Trade in combination with International Finance makes for International Economics. Since the Second World War, most of the superpowers have affiliated to world-regulatory bodies like WTO and GATT. This is in view to build a globally regulated Free Trade structure. Tariffs like import and export duties are heavily regulated and it works in favor of producing laws which denies shutting down a country from entering another national market.

Manufacturing covers a huge range of industries from shell craft manufacturers to guitar makers to clothing industries and so many others. Almost all of the conceivable product and technology we use daily are produced through manufacturing.

Manufacturing is also identified with engineering and industrial design. Major manufacturers include car manufacturers such as General Motors, Chrysler, Boeing and others. Examples of manufacturing sectors are: biological and medical devices, electronic devices, aviation and aeronautics, metals and plastics fabrication, food, beverages and cosmetics, printing, leisure and entertainment equipment, transportation and paper and chemical processing.

Manufacturing involves a number of functions such as quality control, production, purchasing and other important functions. These functions are important in order to convert the raw materials to finished goods or to come up with the final product.

Important Components in a Manufacturing Business

Materials

• Raw Materials - these are the materials needed for production in its original or natural state.
• Work in Process - these are raw materials being processed or in the middle of being converted into finished goods.
• Finished Goods - final product.
• Labor - pertains to the skills needed to convert raw materials to finished goods. Labor is necessary for the whole manufacturing process. It could be direct labor which is necessary for the production of the good such as sewers for clothing. Or, it could be indirect labor such as human resources personnel which compute the salary of all employees of a manufacturing concern.
• Capital - this is the money used to buy raw materials, pay for labor or to come up with the finished product.

Organizations were being reshaped by the demand of heavy infusions of capital. Conflicts occurred between agricultural workers and industrial society. Workers were unskilled, children and women work at night shift. These early management pioneers proposed solutions for coping with the growing factory system

Robert Owen (1771-1858)

Robert Owen was a paradox in the turbulent era of the Industrial Revolution. He had a vision of a new industrial society that was to be a combination of agricultural and industrial commune and hardened back to the lost days of more primitive people.

Philosophically, he viewed people as powerless, held in the grips of revolutionary forces of the new age of machinery, which destroyed moral purpose and social solidarity. His struggle was a long and frustrating one and he appears in history as a King Canute ordering the waves of progress to recede.

Owen at the age of eighteen founded his first factory in Manchester, England. In 1794 or 1795, he established a new partnership, the New Lanark, Scotland, venture. At New Lanark, he encountered the ubiquitous problem of scarcity of labor. The children worked thirteen hours per day.

Owen continued to employ children but tried to improve their living conditions. Owen began to form new ideas about the welfare of society. The economic and social problem was to develop agriculture to use intensive methods of cultivation to feed more people. He therefore prepared a plan:

1. To cultivate soil with spade instead of plough.
2. To make such changes as the spade cultivation requires, to render it easy and profitable to individuals and beneficial to the country.
3. To adopt a standard of value, by means of which, the exchange of the products of labor may proceed without check or limit, until wealth shall become abundant, that any further increase to it will be useless, and will not be desired.

Owen's spade husbandry plan of 1821 would create jobs, enabling more people to be employed, thereby increasing their ability to consume products of industry. To create new factory ethos, he tried to use moral suasion rather than corporal punishment. He developed or particular unique device, the silent monitor to aid discipline.

Owen chided his fellow manufacturers for not understanding human element. He charged that they would spend thousands on the best machines, yet buy the cheapest labor. He held that human were creatures of their environment, relatively incapable of escaping it without a moral rearmament through education. Owen felt that character developed solely if the material and moral environment was proper.

In 1813, he proposed a factory bill to prohibit the employment of children under the age of ten, and oppose night work for children. This bill became a law in 1819.

A biographer suggested that Owen frustrated in his attempt to reform the society. Failing to achieve his goal in England, he bought thirty thousands acres in Posey County, Indiana, United States of America. He renamed it New Harmony, and set out to achieve his social reforms.

Among the settlers in New Harmony, there were those who had heard that New Harmony was a place where you could work a little, and the society would still feed, clothe, and house you. Owen try to reorganize this society but gave up and leaving in 1827.

After New Harmony, Owen found himself both financially and emotionally broken. In 1834, Owen led the British Trade Union movement, a working class movement based on the idea of collective action to control the means of production. He failed. Robert Owen, a Utopian socialist, sowed the first seeds of concern for the human element in industry.

Andrew Ure (18 May 1778 - 2 January 1857)

Andrew Ure was a Scottish professor of chemistry and natural philosophy. Ure gained fame by his speeches and writings that advocated the great benefits of industrial capitalism.

He deeply concerned with industrial education. The principle of the factory system was the substitution of mechanical science for hand skill, and to provide for the graduation of labor among artisans. Ure sought an automatic plan to prevent individual intractable workers from stopping work as they pleased and thereby throwing a whole factory into disorder.

According to Ure, workers had to recognize the benefits of mechanization and not resist its introduction. To establish this automatic plan, management had to arrange and connect manufactures to achieve harmony of the whole. In every establishment there were three principles of action: the mechanical; the moral and the commercial.

Mechanical referred to the techniques and processes of production; moral referred to the condition of personnel and commercial referred to sustaining the organization through selling and financing.

His book "The Philosophy of Manufactures” was published in 1835, played an important role in molding a public opinion on the factory system amid critical debates on factory reform and new poor laws. This set out the basis of the factory system of production. It also defended the working conditions of factories during the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

Charles Babbage (26 December 1791-18 October 1871)

Charles Babbage was an English mathematician, philosopher, and mechanical engineer who originated the idea of a programmable computer. He theorized and applied a scientific approach to management long before the scientific management era began in the United States. He demonstrated the world's first practical mechanical calculator, his difference engine, in 1822.

As early as 1933, he conceived his analytical engine that could in effect, scan stream of instruction and put them into operation. Babbage's computer had all basic elements of modern computer such as memory (store), arithmetic unit (mill), a punch card input system, external memory storage and conditional transfer. Babbage also created an apparatus for printing on paper.

He limited his research to developing a computer program to play tick-tack toe and chess, but he saw that the machine, that he called automaton, could be programmed to make the best possible combination of position and moves, including anticipation as far as three moves in advance.

Inevitably, Babbage's inquisitive mind led him to write of management. His most successful book was "On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures", Published in 1832. As a management scientist, Babbage was interested in machinery, tools, the efficient use of power, developing counting machines to check quantity of work, and economy in the use of raw materials; these he called the mechanical principles of manufacturing.

On the human side, Babbage attempts to show the mutuality of interest between the worker and the factory owner. Babbage's profit sharing scheme had two facets: that a portion of wages would depend on factory profits and that the worker should derive more advantage from applying any improvement he might discover.

Babbage saw a number of advantages in his proposal: each worker would have direct interest in the firm's prosperity; each would stimulated to prevent the waste and mismanagement; every department would be improved; and it would be the common interest of all to hire only the most skillful workers.

Pierre Charles François Dupin (1784-1873)

Pierre Charles François Dupin was a French Catholic mathematician. Dupin was the second individual who pioneered in industrial education. For twelve year, he taught geometry and mechanic to the workers in order to develop prosperity across the country.

Hoaglund reported that by 1826, Dupin's material on management had been presented in ninety-eight French cities to five thousand or more workers and supervisors. Dupin also demonstrated a rudimentary grasp of the concept of time study and the need to balance work loads after labor was divided: When the division of work is put into operation the most scrupulous attention must be exercised to calculate the duration of each type of operation, in order to proportion the work to the particular number of workers that are assigned.

Dupin also recognize worker uneasiness over the introduction of mechanization into French industry. He encouraged workers and managers to recognize the benefits of mechanization to them and to society.

For Dupin, Mechanization created job rather than destroyed them. He called for widespread industrial training to permit the agrarian and unskilled worker to share the prosperity of industrialization.

The Howard govt has given special emphasis to labor market reform as a policy solution to reducing structural unemployment and dealing with Australia's upcoming labor shortage. Beginning with the 1996 Workplace Relations Act through enterprise level wage bargaining and wage increases in line with economic circumstances and productivity improvements, these reforms have been significantly continued with the 2006 Workplace Relations (Work Choices) Amendment Act These extensive reforms introduced a single national industrial relations system which substantially modified unfair dismissal legislation, allowed minimum wages to be more flexible and removed a number of structural and institutional impediments to the developments of an efficient labor market.

It was recognized that a more flexible system of minimum wages may initially reduce labor productivity as more low productivity workers are encourages into the workforce. In the longer term, this more flexible labor market will promote productivity by encouraging companies to innovate and improve their training programs etc.

International competitiveness:

OZ industries operate in a highly competitive global economy. If the industrial relations system produces rising real labor costs, it will make Oz industries less competitive on global markets and will affect our economic performance. The decentralization of wage determination has contributed to higher productivity growth and the cost of labor in Australia has become more competitive as a result.

Income Inequality:

the deregulated industrial relations system is increasing the degree of wage dispersion - that is, widening the gap between income levels. Workers with greater skills and who belong to stronger unions tend to receive larger wage increases under enterprise agreements, while those with less skills and in weaker position receive the smaller safety net wage adjustments.

Govt argument:

OZ should implement further changes to the industrial relations system because previous reforms have been successful and so making further changes will also be successful. The govt also claims that although it isn't broken, the industrial relations system is far to complex for the average Australian and so needs to be overhauled to encourage maximum procedural simplicity. As PM Howard said in an address to the Sydney Institute, July 11 2005 “We will forge this era only by unleashing a new burst of productivity growth that, in turn, will benefit all society.”

Arguments against:

Economic commentators like Tim Colebatch argue that Work Choices will put the current system at risk, especially because the changes will shift the bargaining power from employees to employers.

System may reflect bargaining power rather than price signals.

No mechanism to prevent the occurrence of wage-push inflation. When growth is strong and the labor force is close to full employment, workers may demand wage rises, leading to inflationary pressures and spirals

The 2006 Work Choices changes are significant in that they are probably the most radical changes proposed since PM Stanley attempted a national takeover of state industrial powers in the late 1920s. With the changes coming into effect in 2006 but their full impact only emerging in years to come, the debate over industrial relations will continue for a long time yet.

Training is more important - giving workers higher skills base