Posted on 09/16/2011 1:33:01 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
After 30 months of unemployment, 400 applications, and only three in-person interviews, I stood looking at my last unemployment benefit without a job in sight.
The temptation was to frame it, since it marks one of those transitions in life that merits being remembered. But I needed the money more than a memento, so I took my last unemployment check to the bank and deposited it -- $367 for some necessities. Food, rent, gas. My last unemployment check was $160 less than my usual weekly benefit, but still a welcome boost to my sagging finances. How I will miss those Tuesday trips to the mailbox and then the bank, one of the few regular events in my upended, irregular life!
I had always thought the unemployed were society's unfortunates, people unlike me lacking in education or training or experience or skills. Then in March of 2009, the Hearst Corporation quit publishing the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I suddenly became a labor statistic, one of millions without work in the worst economic implosion since the Depression. I was more fortunate than many unemployed people since the Newspaper Guild negotiated a decent severance that yielded two weeks' pay for every year of employment. Since I had spent more than a quarter century underneath the P-I's landmark globe, my severance was a year's salary, although that lump sum check as I left the building forever had a tax bite from a Great White Shark.
Now my severance is exhausted, as is my unemployment, and I am scrambling every day for work. I had been a columnist, then the book critic for the P-I, enviable newspaper jobs even among my colleagues. Now I seek any writing or editing work that I discover,
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
1) I live in CT, but she lives in CA, Bay Area
2) BS in Engineering, materials engineering.
3) That is part of the problem I guess. My brother has an excellent job, which makes more than she could at entry level. Like 3-4x more. But even still she hasn’t stuck her nose up at jobs because of money, she is just looking for experience. He gets a huge retention bonus in a year because his company was bought by a larger competitor, so maybe after that they’d be willing to look further afield.
Sir, you are mistaken. I find that many people like you, who have a job, have some contempt for the long-term unemployed. You are convinced that if you lost your job, your own sterling job history and determination to get hired again would keep you from remaining jobless for very long. That may have been true in the past, but it’s no longer the case.
Let me tell you about a situation with which I’m familiar. My firm lost a major contract and began laying people off about a year and a half ago. All in all, several hundred were laid off in our town and surrounds, and hundreds more were laid off in other cities. Most of us have an excellent work history, useful skills, and a great work ethic, and we live in an area with relatively low unemployment compared to the rest of the US because of the presence of the federal government, so we all thought we’d be hired again shortly.
Here’s the interesting part: all the younger people (below 40) did get jobs pretty quickly. Of the people over 50, only a few have been hired. Only two of those over 55 have been hired again. Nobody over 60 has gotten a job.
Now, does it seem likely to you that ALL of the middle-aged people at my office were slackers who didn’t try to get job? In fact, we all scrambled and competed. We did everything we were supposed to do to get jobs: kept our skills up to date with courses, networked, volunteered, did social media self-marketing, targeted companies, used online resources, contacts, employment agencies, cold-calling, professional resume re-writing, coaching, classes on interviewing, you name it. But you can’t persuade a hiring manager to hire you if you can’t even get an interview. You can’t waylay him in the parking lot if you can’t get past the security guard at the main gate. Go from door to door on the commercial strip, asking at every business if they’ll hire you or at least look at your resume, and you’ll be laughed at: “Apply online,” they’ll say, or “We don’t do the hiring it, they do it at Corporate,” or “Are you kidding? We just laid off our secretary, and she’d been with us for 12 years,” or “We’re getting ready to go out of business and sell our fixtures, we’re obviously not hiring.”
The sad statistics are that many older workers (by which is meant, anybody over 50) may never be hired again no matter how fabulous their job skills. We are probably just going to have to figure out some home business to run.
By the way, my lovely 23-year-old daughter graduated from college this spring and had a job lined up back in February. She had been working summers for the same company and they were so delighted with her that they wanted her to work for them year-round. But in early August she was told they were out of money and couldn’t keep her around after Labor Day. She started sending out resumes a month ago, had two interviews, got hired, and started work at a very good new position this past week, even though the usual wisdom is that her degree area isn’t good for getting a job. Her competition was a woman in her late forties and a woman in her early thirties, both of whom had far more accomplishments and much better resumes than my daughter has. You tell me: you think there may be some age discrimination going on that benefited my gorgeous, cute, but inexperienced daughter?
Anyway, your basic premise is flawed. Even if half of the 15 million people out of work are slackers, even if as much as 66% of them aren’t trying hard to get work, the fact is that there are still going to be five million people who aren’t slackers and really are knocking themselves out to get one million available jobs. FIVE MILLION! I’m sorry, trying hard may not cut it for the older worker. -You- may “not know anybody who is willing to work hard and smart that stays unemployed for any length of time,” but I do. I know hundreds.
“Do these people on unemployment get free medical care and/or food stamps?”
Of course they do. In addition to a host of other lesser known (to us) programs. There’s a tremendous amount of overlap among the various federal / state / local programs.
How’d you break into it? It’s one field I have considered for the future (a teacher and love it but don’t see myself doing it forever). I was a journalist prior to teaching.
That’s sad. As a former journalist, I certainly never wrote opinionated stories. But, many do. That’s one of the reasons I quit, not to mention constant pay cuts and uncertainty in the industry. Loved it, but it’s not worth all that.
Getting paid to write?
The internet has made everybody a published author.
If everybody is an author, one cannot expect much pay, if any.
Adapt to survive, in this changed paradigm.
Like doing something which fewer people can do.
The only thing I’ve been “formally” trained for in the IT world is Cobol Programming in an IMS DB/DC environment. Everything else is “self taught” and volunteering to do things that needed to be done.
Heck, I was at a contract at “the” phone company back in the mid-1990’s and became really good with Visio. Nowadays, it’s a HUGE plus and I can make to do stuff a lot of folks can’t. Same with Word and Excel.
Also, I discovered a while back that Google could save my butt. I was tasked to create a document for tracking software certificates in my company (a very large company) and had no clue what to do. So I do some internet searches and found all sorts of documents like the one I needed to creat. I ended up emulating the one created by some government agency in New Zealand. I ended up getting kudos from a few directors and even a VP.
I think it’s one of those “knack” things. People seem to like the way I communicate in official documents. You see a bit of it here when I think things out and say what I need to in a brief concise way, unlike this post...
But the internet can teach you to do almost anything but self brain surgery. And that’s only ‘cause you have to turn it off to work on it. The second (maybe first) biggest roadblock needs to be removed, as well: Fear. Fear of the inability to learn what you need to, fear of doing it wrong. Stuff like that.
My motto is something I actually read that was written by an actual rocket scientist: Even rocket science ain’t rocket science.
I have to call shenanigans on this.
He would not be happier as a checker than being his own boss. Manager or even assistant manager? Maybe.
Impressive foresight. How did you make the transformation from reporter to marketing/sales?
Interesting points. I guess I get frustrated by how many job ads require a technical communication degree or something similar, but I assume not every job is like that as long as you can show writing samples etc.
I happened to mention this to my step dad who was in the coal business. He asked how much I was making for my 70 hours and I told him. His response was, “Hell, Eric; I had more expenses last year than your had income. Why don't you quit your job and come to work for me.”
I learned about Midwest coal, Appalachian coals, Wyoming coals, Pet coke, fusion temperatures, BTUs, boilers, spreader stokers and chain grates and nearly everything there is to price coal vs. natural gas, oil, heavy oils, etc. This was pretty basic math and surprisingly, I took to it.
The company was broken up and I went to work for a Great Lakes coal brokerage and dock operator that was later acquired by a major oil company. They moved my family and I to Minneapolis where I moved into residual fuels from the refinery and later brokered heavy oils from other refineries for Great Lakes steamships. I always accepted the jobs nobody wanted or understood and if it meant three or four days of travel, I went.
I have no doubt that my communications skills, my ability to interview (cold call) and good letter writing paved my way. I had a few important breaks (my step dad gave me a leg up) but I made the best of the opportunities and was always willing to take on the jobs that baffled or challenged others.
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