The Ballad Cont'd

When you get home, you inform your spouse or significant other of the day’s events. They seem to share your enthusiasm and agree that all will be fine since plenty jobs out there and plenty of money in savings, so, a little bump in the road and no sense in changing your plans for the weekend and you still want to get that kitchen updated. You may as well enjoy it; it will be the last time you do anything like that for a long time, if ever again. Oh, to keep with the spirit of things you decide to update your resume and get that quickly out of the way and on with your weekend plans.

Then Monday comes. In your field you have networked and you make some calls to see who may be in need of your services. Much to your chagrin, other companies have been doing the same thing yours has and many of your former associates are now in the same boat as you. But you still cannot see the bigger picture, you refuse to. You have been told a good education and work ethic, both of which you have in spades, will always pay off. As you scour the want-ads both in print and online you are starting to see a pattern, less and less jobs for what you can do. But remember what that old college professor told you? It is not the kind of degree you have; it is having a degree that counts. It shows you can be committed to a goal and achieve it and you can be trained to do anything. So, you email or send out your resume to a few companies that first day thinking your phone will ring. Oh, your phone bill is due, may as well pay it now. Then you realize all the bills are due. You have the money now so you pay them without thinking for a minute that the money you are sending out is not going to get replenished anytime soon. After a few days you still haven’t heard back from anyone you sent your resume to so you decide to do a few follow ups. The only thing you take from this is that these companies are still reviewing their applicants and will select a few for interviews and if yours is chosen, they will give you a call. Again, you feel this is nothing to be alarmed about. When you got your job at your last company, let’s say ten years ago, it took about a month for the whole process to work its way out. That is just the nature of things. What you fail to realize at this moment is that before you were leaving one company to work for another, not starting from scratch.

Another week goes by and you have sent out more resumes and await the calls but there is nothing. Your phone rings, but it is only a wrong number. You are starting to get a little excited about things, but still nothing to get too worked up about. You talk to your fellow unemployed and they mention an employment agency. You, of course, scoff at that idea since this is only a bump. Speaking of bumps, you bumped you leg a few days ago and it is swelling up, you better get to a doctor to have that checked out. You make an appointment, but not for another week so you make do. Still no news on the job front except for the news announcement that unemployment is climbing and in your town too. Again, you think nothing of it. There is always a job available for you in your field.

Myth number two, the unemployed are lazy dead beats who won’t get a job and there are always jobs at fast-food or they could pick up a broom. Let’s take a break from our little scenario so we can address this fallacy. As of right now, (October, 2010), the US unemployment rate is 9.6% with no signs of going down any time soon. In some places in this country it is higher or lower by varying degrees. I had an old economics professor explain to me that the number the government gives is only part of the picture. That number measures only what they can measure, the people filing for benefits. It makes no mention of the people who are underemployed, the part-timers, or the people who simply gave up and will, very realistically, probably never work again.

That 9.6% equates to roughly 15 million people. But since it does not take other factors, we have to add that in ourselves. For the sake of argument let’s tag on another 10 million. (I remember I am supposed to double that figure, but I want to stay on the conservative side for now) So that is 25 million people out of work that some will say they are too lazy to get one of the 25 million jobs available. OK, a few punches on the calculator will tell us that according to them, there are 500,000 jobs available per state. That means there are more jobs than people in Wyoming! But not so fast, let us also assume that there are 1 million fast-food joints out there, that means that each one of them need to hire 25 additional people in each store. I have worked fast-food before and I can tell you that most of these stores have about 20 to 30 people working in them mostly part-time. In no way would they be able to absorb an additional 25 people part-time or not. But what about picking up a broom or some other field? This is where it gets sticky. Keeping the fast-food idea and all the cleaning and ditch-digging and unskilled labor jobs that may or may not be available, remember what I said about what once worked for you will now work against you? This is it and this is how it works.

As I was looking for a job, I got reject notice after reject notice. Every one of them that did not say “does not fit our criteria” answered with “over qualified”, either too little or too much experience. All that crap we are told about an education taking you far is about to be set on its head. If you worked in any capacity in finance or legal or scientific field or any job that required a bachelors, your odds of scoring even the simplest of jobs is slim. The more advanced degrees you have the slimmer the chances. Simply put, these places do not want to waste their time and money into training you with the very constant and very real threat of you leaving after a short while when something better fitted to your experience comes along. My wife has an MBA with an emphasis in International Business, she is also bilingual and the only job she got offered was as a waitress. I know that pretty much voids my argument, but remember she is an immigrant. The odds of her finding any job that is more aligned with her degree, coupled with her being an immigrant, are slim and her employer knows that. Even advancing in her job is unlikely since, and I really hate to say this, is because she is an immigrant. Spare me the idea that foreigners are taking American jobs, she came here legally and that idea goes much deeper than simply being a member of a wait staff.

The Ballad of the Unemployed

Hi, my name is James and I am unemployed. Well, I was unemployed. I lucked myself into a job that I more or less enjoy, but it is a paycheck. I no longer have to sweat bullets if I am going to be able to heat my apartment for the winter, or if I am even going to have an apartment for the winter.

A short bio, I am a 40 year old college graduate with a degree in chemistry. A BS degree to full meaning of the BS it means to have it. It has not served me well at all since most companies want a PhD to play with their chemicals, but I did work at various times and in various roles in various companies with that degree. I was a mediocre student at best. I got a few B’s and C’s and the occasional A, but it was a nightmare getting that degree and I had and still have no interest on going any further with my chemical education. So, since that degree has served me so well, I decided to return and get another one. This time in the degree is in Political Science and for no better reason that it did not involve a lot of math. Plus, learning things is fun.

OK, the last job I worked that related to chemistry was as a technician in a chemical repository. I prepared samples and inventoried samples as they came in. It was about as boring as you could get and a real heartbreaker since I learned that the person I was working with had no degree in chemistry and in fact, had no degree at all. After a few months, the project I was hired for ended and I was let go due to seniority. I had initial bitterness, but I had grown to like my coworker very much and figured he deserved the job more than I did since he had a family to take care of and I had only my fat mouth to feed. Also, I had never –to that point, been without a job for any period longer than a week or so, as a result I had no worries. I left to enjoy my weekend and update my resume and began thinking about what adventures awaited me.

If I could only have seen the future, I would have been a little less careless with things. A week came and went and I had no prospects. Then another week went by, and then another. Soon, my meager savings was dwindling fast and bills were coming due. I bit the bullet and filed for unemployment. I hated doing that. Not that I disagree with getting it or even its existence, I just felt it was not for me. After a while, it was all I could do stay afloat. I had to make changes on how I did things, turned down the heat and started leaving lights off as long as I could. I needed internet access so I could look for a job, or at least assist in the task. I changed my phone plan to the bare minimum and cable got reduced to minimum. I still thought I could pull it through.

After 5 months of this, I landed a temp job that ended up lasting a year, after the job was overI was in the same boat as before. This time, however, I had more responsibilities to deal with. I had acquired things like a car, a few credit cards and a fiancé, which in retrospect all was foolish to do as a temp, but I felt good about things. When I was told that a year was too long for that company to have a temp on its rolls and with no way of making it a permanent position, I had a sinking feeling. I still felt as before that I could find something quickly, and compared to others I know and have read about, I did find a job in a month and half. That it took a fraction of the time to find a job, it took a lot of cajoling to get it. I had lucked out as this was summer of 2007 and by that fall, the whole world would be turned on its economic ear and a year after that it was only going to get worse.

During my unemployment period, I began to collect reasons for not getting hired. What was the motivation behind not hiring me? Why couldn’t a man of my education and experience land a job anywhere? Here I will write in a little more detail about my experience and the experience of those dear to me who have been unemployed. I will dispel of the idea that all unemployed people are lazy deadbeats who want to suck off the public teat. I will talk about some of the factors as to why the unemployed stay unemployed, what happens to their lives and why what formerly worked for them, is now working against them. I will go into the notion that the numbers and percentages you hear rattled off on the news are no way indicative of the actual numbers of people really looking for work. Finally, I will offer up some clear and simple solutions for getting people back to work.

First, let’s get one thing that should be obvious to everyone, being unemployed sucks. Barring a health disaster or the loss of a loved one, it is the worst feeling many of us will ever have. To be unemployed is not so much as a forced lifestyle change as it is a forced lifestyle reboot. I had a professor tell me if you are married, with a partner or whatever and lose your job, that is an instant recession, if you are single and lose your job, then that is an instant depression. If you were lucky enough to put some money away, then that will give you a little breathing room, but believe me that money will disappear very quickly. If you were to lose all your possessions due to some natural disaster or accident, you will still feel sadness and uncertainty, but at least you can plan for rebuilding your life. If you lost everything due to a job loss, then you do not know when or even if you will be able to rebuild your life. (I will not judge, unless you really screwed up at your job, losing your income for any reason is going to be bad) Let’s go over a few myths about unemployment and the unemployed.

Myth number one, they [the unemployed] bring it on themselves and are personally responsible for the mess they are in. The people who say this are the old-school types who seem to think that there is still such a thing as job security and if you lose your job and find yourself without a home or car or whatever then it is your fault for angering your employer and your fault for living outside your means. My wife is Taiwanese and I have this argument with her from time to time. I guess it is ingrained in the Asian conscious that savings is the way to go and just pay cash for everything and to various degrees I can accept this. But this is not the reality we live in. Oh, I can hear you say it does not matter, you should still live within your means and I agree, but let me paint a picture that is not uncommon in today’s world. Let’s say you have a decent education and you have a good job that pays about $100,000 per year. After taxes and deductions such as health insurance and your 401k, that brings that to about $50,000 a year. Luckily your student loans are paid off and you waited till then to buy a new car and a house. You are married or otherwise in a committed relationship, and your significant other (“other”) works as well, but makes significantly less than you do for whatever reasons. Your income allows you to have one or two credit cards with limits of about $1000 each. You like it that way since it allows you be spontaneous without going overboard and you always pay it off at once. You are able to save about 20% each month and over the past few years have a nice safety net squared away in the bank. All is going good for you, even after all your bills are paid and savings accounted for, you still have enough on hand to go do things on weekends like take day-trips here and there, go to new and trendy restaurants that charge $100 for the cheese plate. You are living good and well within your means.

But then the hammer falls. You go to work on a Friday and before you leave, you are called into the HR office to be told that your position has been cancelled due to cut-backs. They thank you for your service, make you sign a piece of paper that says you will never divulge what you learned from your company and maybe a non-compete form (this is more common than you think. Your company spent time and money fine-tuning the knowledge your brought with you and training you to fit nicely in the market place of your company, they do not want to think they gave a competitor a freely trained employee) and you get your last check, which they graciously gave you a month’s salary. Then you give them your badge and get escorted out. They will mail you your personal affects since they want to make sure you do not take anything that belongs to them. Welcome to your new reality.

On your way home you do not think much about it. You are educated and have experience and so, this is just a temporary setback and you will be back among the working crowd before you know it and you have savings to cover what you think will be at best a two-week lag in getting a pay check. Using the Kubler-Ross model of the “5-stages of grief”, this is stage one, “denial”. What you do not know is that your job and your field is changing and that many people who did what you did are now in the same boat and that all that work you took so much pride and pleasure in doing is now being done by someone on the other side of the planet for a fraction of what you made. You will never work in your field again.