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December 11, 2006
SouthAmerica: Reply to Eusdaiki
Quoting from my article published on January 2003:
âI see first hand on a daily basis, when I go to the Labor Department, what is happening to unemployed workers in New Jersey. Two people were evicted from their homes recently. Another person was in the process of his car being repossessed. Three other people have filed for bankruptcy protection under chapter-7. And most of the other people, who have used up their unemployment extensions, are now depleting any savings that they have left for their retirement. These people have no idea how they will be able to manage financially, when they get to retirement age, and all their savings are gone.
The situation is getting more and more scary by the day, since I see a drastic increase of people who are losing their jobs and coming to the Labor Department to ask for help. The quality of the people unemployed is mind boggling, since 50 percent of today's unemployed have at least a college degree. One of the people that I see at the labor department is a young man 33 years old who graduated from Harvard University, and he also has an MBA from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has been looking for a job for over a year.
For the first time in US history, 50 percent of the people who are unemployed are well-educated people. Does it make any difference if the unemployed people are well educated or if they are blue color workers? You bet it does.
â¦So much hype for the American dream, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics out of 100 people that start working at age 25, by age 65â1 percent are wealthy, 4 percent have enough money to retire, 3 percent are still working (can't afford to quit), 63 percent depend on Social Security, friends or charity, 29 percent are dead.
The reality is 95 percent of all Americans by age 65 retire in poverty after working for 45 years or they are dead.
For the people who are unemployed, the economic depression is already here. For the people who still have jobs, they know that if they lose their jobs it will be almost impossible to find a new job. The difference between past recessions and the current job slump is that the people laid-off in the past would be rehired when the economy recovered. This time around most people's jobs have been gone forever.â
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The last few years when I heard people such as Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, many economic commentators, politicians and senior officials of the Bush administration saying that the solution for people to find new jobs â after a layoff or a company closing â the magic word is retraining. I hear those guys talking about retraining all the time.
I used to go to this Labor department center here in New Jersey â for you to participate of that labor department program you had to have at least a college degree. They had various centers here in N J where people could go when looking for a job. The center had a bank of telephones for people to call potential employers, they also had various fax machines and a commercial Xerox machine, and they had a number of computers with various software including Word, Excel, Power Point and so on.
The center also had seminars about writing resumes, how to look for a job, how to interview, and so onâ¦.
All these computers were connected to the internet and you could spend all day posting your resume everywhere on the internet.
It did get to a point that the manager of the center had to be honest with us and he told me more than once that there is nothing wrong with your resume â and he told me you have a top-notch resume and professional background.
Every time I heard about retraining on the news as a solution for the growing unemployment problem â the manager of the center used to tell us that there was no budget for retraining â it was only politicians and media talk, besides he used to say to our group retrain most of you to do what? Since most of us had a heavy-duty background.
The manager of the labor department center told me that his superiors at the Labor department were aware that the unemployment rate here in New Jersey were a lot higher than the number published for public consumption. Instead of the 5 to 5.5 percent unemployment rate that the government had been reporting the real number were close to 13 percent.
If all these people with superb resumes were not able to find jobs around the New York Metropolitan area â I imagine how hard must be for people to find jobs in other areas of the country.
I still laugh when people say that the solution to find a new job after losing your current job for one reason or another â it is retraining.
Retraining for what?
On July 31, 2006 The New York Times published a front-page story âMen Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job.â It was a very long article and the article said:
ââ¦Millions of men like Mr. Beggerow â men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 â have dropped out of regular workâ¦..About 13 percent of American men in this group are not working, up from 4 percent in the late 1960âs. The difference represents 4 million men who would be working today if the employment rate had remained where it was in the 1950âs and 1960âs.â
I knew exactly what The New York Times articles was saying because I saw many of these people looking for jobs at the Labor department in New Jersey. The ironic part is that most of these people were not considered unemployed by the US government statistics â even though they were going to the Labor department every day to look for a job all these people were classified as âdiscouraged workersâ â a new classification that the Labor department created to reduce the real number of unemployed people.
The manager of the labor dept. center told me a number of times most of you have solid backgrounds, and many of you used to be managers and senior executives â retrain you guys to do what? To be brain surgeons, nurses, policemen, high school teachers?
He told me that the Labor dept. was aware that thousands of well qualified people were losing their jobs at Lucent Technologies, AT&T, many drug manufacturers, and so on in New Jersey and there were no new jobs being created to replace not only these thousands of good paying jobs that were being lost, but also the jobs that were being lost to new technologies, and to outsourcing.
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As you said: âIf you´re a middle class US citizen and you are afraid your job might get outsource, you should head back to school ASAPâ
That is not a solution for most people unless you are at that age that most people go to school to get an education.
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