May 5, 2013 - Sky Valley Chronicle article
(NATIONAL) -- You may have heard the good news this week about the improving employment picture for Americans in the still fragile economic recovery from th ...
Continue
May 5, 2013 - Sky Valley Chronicle article
(NATIONAL) -- You may have heard the good news this week about the improving employment picture for Americans in the still fragile economic recovery from the brutal Great Recession.
The latest report from the Labor Department Friday seemed to bolster the theory that the U.S. job market is improving despite higher taxes and government spending cuts that took effect this year.
U.S. employers added 165,000 jobs in April and hiring was much stronger in the previous two months than the government first estimated.
Those job increases helped reduce the unemployment rate from 7.6 percent to a four-year low of 7.5 percent.
The only sectors of the economy that cut jobs last month were construction and government.
But behind those rosy numbers lies a dirty little secret: capitalism seems to have no further use for anyone over the age of 55.
A charge that sounds a bit strong? Go talk with someone 55 and older who has been looking for a job.
OVER 55 AND LOOKING FOR WORK: A STRUGGLE
A new report by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) says that despite the rosier jobs picture in April, for those Americans ages 55 or older who have been unemployed long-term, "the prospect of finding work is greatly limited."
And that may be putting it mildly.
A recent PBS report centered on "The Work Place," a job training center in Bridgeport, Connecticut and the report highlights the massive hurdle that older workers are up against in an American economy where employers seem to want only the youngest, cheapest workers they can find.
Joe Carbone runs The Workplace and he knows what these people are up against. " I was unemployed once for eight-and-a-half months. I used to drive 20 miles to do a little grocery shopping so I wouldn't meet anybody who would be able to look at me and ask, “Did you get a job yet?” So, I know what it can do," said Carbone to PBS.
One woman sitting at the table with Carbone said, "I have been on the Internet daily, all day, eight hours a day. I can't find anything."
The reality for the over-55 worker is scary and even scarier for the more than four million Americans who remain out of work six months or more.
"For those 55 and older, it takes about a year on average to find work, longer than for any other age group," says the PBS report.
Joe Carbone: "They're carrying a double whammy, not just the long-term unemployment, but they're 50 and older. It makes things that are bad even worse."
THE FIRST TO GO, LAST TO COME BACK
From the report:
Fifty-nine-year-old facilities manager Frank Rende lost his job four years ago. Rende says, "We got here in the first place because we were in the highest salary range. We were the first to go. We're going to be the last to come back."
Software developer Geoffrey Weglarz, 55, has been looking for two years. He says he's applied for 481 jobs.
Weglarz says none of those applications has produced a thing because,"They (employers) think that anybody over a certain age is going to be used up."
Asked if she thinks employers are purposely trying to screen out older workers from being hired, unsuccessful job seeker Debora Ducksworth says, "Exactly. And now I'm thinking, I'm going to be 60 in October. Is anyone ever going to hire me?"
Is it age discrimination? Boston College did a survey a few years ago where they asked Human Resources people how they viewed older workers. The survey found that " human resource managers were skeptical of workers like those in Bridgeport. They said they worried about their ability to learn new things, about their physical stamina and basically how long are they going to stay."
Essentially the HR types, when looking at the whole picture of "their assessment of older workers, you really wouldn't go out of your way to hire one."
And there's another reason employers might not want to hire an older worker: If things don't work out, will they be sued?
Mary Corbin thinks so. She believes that age is the reason she was let go a year-and-a-half ago. "No one under 50 was laid off, and it was a large amount of people. In the package that they gave everyone, they emphasized, for signing the package, you will not come back and sue us for age discrimination," said Corbin.
There's yet another strike against the older worker who needs a job just as badly as a younger person needs one.
Some employers say the older worker gets "more expensive on the health care front just because they have more ailments," according to the report.
AND ALL THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR A VERY LONG TIME
According to unemployment stats from January of 2011, "Thirty percent of those who are jobless have been unemployed a year or more (long-term unemployment) as of December 2010. Equaling 4.2 million people — roughly the population of Kentucky — this is 25 percent more people affected by long-term unemployment than a year prior (December 2009, 3.4 million)….Using the CPS data, Pew calculated that the persistent problem of long-term unemployment is occurring across education and age groups but those who are older than 55 are most likely to remain jobless for a year or more.
Additionally, a high level of education only provides limited protection against long-term unemployment — the rates are similar across degree attainment: 31 percent of unemployed workers with a bachelor’s degree have been out of work for a year or more, compared to 36 percent of high school graduates and 33 percent of high school drop-outs."
In May of last year a Forbes report said, "Talk about the dangers of losing your job at age 50 plus. Older workers who lost their jobs during the Great Recession experienced steep pay cuts when they became reemployed...if they were lucky enough to get new jobs at all.
Median monthly earnings declined 23 percent after an unemployment spell for reemployed workers aged 50 to 61, compared with just 11 percent for workers aged 25 to 34, according to the Urban Institute report. For workers 62 and older, post-unemployment earnings plummeted nearly in half (47%), although most of the decline in that age group stemmed from a shift toward part-time employment. “For many workers laid off during and after the Great Recession, the financial ramifications of job loss may persist for the rest of their lives,” the report, Age Disparities in Unemployment and Reemployment during the Great Recession and Recovery, by Richard W. Johnson and Barbara A. Butrica, concludes.
So what happens to the older worker as the worker goes month after month with no job, sometimes stretching into a year or more?
They go through all their savings and 401K retirement plans. That's what happened to older worker Geoffrey Weglarz. He went through everything and then said, "My last unemployment check is next week. I have about $2,000 dollars to my name, and, after that, I don't know...I have no fallback position. I'm behind on my mortgage. I'm on food stamps, and I'm on financial hardship for both electricity and for gas."
Joe Carbone who runs The Workplace notes, "We have got special programs here for veterans, and we should, for people with disabilities, and we should, you know, for dislocated workers, and we should. We see a new population that are unemployable because of the length of their unemployment occurring during the worst recession since the Great Depression, and we're just ignoring them, ignoring them.
I can't tell you what that does to me. I love this country so much, but I can't imagine that we would ever leave any of our citizens, any of our brothers and sisters, to be part of a process that's declaring them hopeless. And that's what's going on."
The full PBS report can be found here.
Close
