Do you think there really are large numbers of discouraged workers?

Great Debates
21

In the Tech sector, retraining will do you little or no good.

For instance, smartphones are big now, and everyone wants people that can write programs for them, especially iOS (Apple’s phone/pad operating system). So training in iOS would be good, right?

Up until the recruiter asks how many years of iOS experience you have. Taking classes does NOT give you experience. By the time you gain experience writing your own apps, the market will have shifted to something new, and you are obsolete again.

22

I don’t know what your actual situation is since I’m not you. And I’m not sure what “cocoon” you think I live in, other than perhaps one of the most competitive industries in one of the most competitive cities in the world. Your particular situation does not mean you live in the “real world” any more than I do, just because it applies to you and you think you have it tougher.

I frequently have this debate with my friends and colleagues. Most of the younger or more technical guys focus on their technical skills. Seems reasonable. That’s what they get paid for and it’s what they are good at. I’m looking at a room full of developers right now, all hard at work programming away. You know what the problem is?

I’m looking at them in Eastern Europe.

Almost none of the actual development work for my company is performed in the US. My actual home office in NY is mostly sales, account and project management and corporate stuff.

Management skills tend to be a lot more transferable and have much more longevity than developer skills.

What “bill”? Most of that stuff you can probably access off the web for free or for the price of a few reference manuals.

23

I am not the one who posted nonsense about the thread (or board) being dominated by 20-somethings or misconstrued the claim that at 45 companies would begin ignoring one’s skillset to turn it around to a claim that 45 year olds did not think that they could be trained.

When you post that sort of stuff, misreading the actual contents fo the thread, you seem to be reading from a prepared text that has no connection to reality.

24

Here are some charts that might be helpful. Here is a chart ofpopulation growth in the US. It only goes to 2006 but even if you assume it plateaued after that, the followed chart will be enlightening. This the US employment to population ratio through 2010. I’m sure it’s improved substantially since then, but the point is that for that line to have declined as much as it did, either population had to grow, employment declined or both, and I think it’s clear from the first chart that it was both.

Finally let’s look at the household formation chart. This is from 2010 census data. A drop in household formations with a growing population means more people living together, which explains how ‘discouraged workers’ are surviving. This was a major theme during the recession and one that as you can see from the chart only started to turn around once the recession bottomed out.

So ‘discouraged workers’ are not a myth by any means. And long term unemployment is much more damaging to the economy than the possibility of inflation, at least that is what I’ve read is the view of incoming fed chair Janet Yellen. So personally I am looking for her to favor the use fed policy to do whatever possible to stimulate employment regardless of the potential inflation risks.

25

BTW, the folks who are better off on unemployment than in a regular job? At least in the US if you are collecting unemployment you ARE counted in the labor force, you are not in the “discouraged” group.

And it varies regionally. Around here the rate of workforce participation, even accounting for worker migration to where the jobs are, has been stuck around 40% since the crash, but in our case the authorities estimate a lot of that is accounted for by a lot of people making out better Off The Books (can’t blame them, if all they have available is part-time seasonal work with no benefits, why bother with something that witholds?).

26

Why don’t you want to believe it?

I’m one too. At 56, and am tired of employers offering me $16/hr entry level jobs. Two years ago I made $80k in a good job. Then the economy tanked and they moved the company to San Fransciso :confused:. I’ve found in a couple of years of hard searching that companies DO want my 40 years of knowledge in my field, but only want to pay me what they pay some pimply 18YO. Piss on that.

We are comfortable in that income loss is not an issue for us. I have other “irons in the fire”, so I generate some income while I take care of the house and an elderly parent.

There are a LOT of people in this same situation. YMMV.

27

You can’t have a company composed entirely of managers. Do you think it’s OK to throw non-management under the bus after 10 years or whatever longevity cycle your industry uses, then blame them for it?

28

My experience when I came back to Spain was that most people weren’t willing to hire me for low-qualifications jobs that I was perfectly willing to perform. “Oh, but you could do so much better!”… I eventually could, but in part I could thanks to someone who was willing to hire me for a job for which I was overqualified :stuck_out_tongue: (they’d been seeking vocational school graduates, every resume they got was from a woman with a college degree and mine was the kind of degree closest to the job).

In some cases the job was a very short-term thing: filling up for a week, things like that. But I could do so much better, you see :confused:
My brother is considering throwing his hands up or thereabouts. His wife has a solid job (doctor with a permanent position in our national healthcare system), childcare is almost more than the income from his current job (he’s managed to get worse jobs with time rather than better ones, partly due to the depressions he gets any time he’s unemployed) and there’s a locksmith who’s been courting him to become his trainee: Bro would get some training and become this guy’s backup so he’s able to offer 24/7 service. Why am I calling this “throw his hands up”? Because he’s thinking of going from full-time-but-a-lot-of-the-time-unemployed to occasional-time-but-for-years (I’m sure the locksmith gets more work than Bro thinks) and hey, as an engineer, he too “could do better” according to too many people.

29

Out of time: note that the people who weren’t willing to hire me knew me, so they knew my qualifications - I hadn’t specifically given them a resume or anything. We were talking, they mentioned they needed someone to cover up an upcoming leave, I offered myself, “oh but you could do so much better!”

It’s the blessing and the curse of a smallish town, it takes people five minutes to “get your record” assuming they didn’t already have it.

30

Another reason is because they have more life experience, and you can’t dink them around in ways that you can with younger workers.

31

Back in my early 30’s I wanted to find a different company to work for and so started looking. I thought I had good experience because I was aggressive and took every ‘promotion’ and offer my employer gave me* so I could get the experience. I thought I would be a good ‘catch’. I wrote up a bang up resume and sent it out.

{crickets}

I showed my resume to many knowledgeable people and they thought the resume was impressive and had no feedback to give me.

FINALLY, I found the problem. Someone that declined to interview me actually took my call and answered my question of “Why no interview”.

Answer…I was overqualified.

The position I applied for was probably 1 step away from entry level and paid much more than I was making…How in THE HELL could I be overqualified???

I looked at the resume again and decided to ‘dummy it up’. I took out some of the things I was most proud of and toned it down.

BAM BAM BAM interview after interview and finally took a job that paid a little over twice what I was currently making.

:confused:

  • Not really a promotion when no salary increase is given so after a few years I was extremely underpaid for what I was doing.
32

I’m not sure this is true anymore.

Older people who have been out of work a long time will put up with a lot more than you think. They just want the chance.

The truth is, though… The average kid out of college has no dependents, no major health issues, and can work and travel at will, often putting in 80 hour work weeks because they can. You try doing that with a family, and the stress that is put on your marriage, your connections with your kids, friendships, whatever… They all take a hit.

I’m sorry, but I believe that people who have made comments like “i can’t believe people have given up”, or " i don’t believe people have thrown up their hands" have never been laid off post 9/11/2001. And if they have, their job search was over fairly quickly, for whatever reason.

But if and when you do get laid off, get ready for a bumpy, humiliating ride, and one that you will find hard to get off of no matter what you do. I’ve known people with advanced degrees unable to get back into the workforce because of many of the reasons already stated. Smart people. And the kind of rejection one experiences over time begins to eat away at the strongest self-esteem, I don’t care who you are. I know people who have lost their houses, their marriages have broken up, or have had to take a job out of the area they live and leave their families behind because of the economics of the situation. Stress is real. People I would consider rocks have suffered nervous breakdowns, or have become depressed and cannot find their way out of the hole. That does not make a great interviewing candidate. I have two master’s degrees and post graduate work, but that is more of a liability in today’s world. Unless, of course, I enter academia, but in that case, I would have to get my PhD which is something I simply don’t have the time to devote to.

It’s the single hardest thing I had to go through in my professional life, and I pray it never happens to me again. But there are no guarantees. Some of you will find that out when you become collateral damage in a layoff, and the arrogance you currently hold will slowly slip away as the weeks and months pile up. When you hit the year mark, you will feel a sting that is impossible to describe unless you’ve been there. And if you have been there, I don’t need to describe it to you.
[Slight hijack]

One of the most incredibly arrogant and humorous things i ever heard was the discussion of how Wall St. Investment banking firms had to pay their employees the 6 and 7 figure bonuses they have come to know and love. When the taxpayers were footing the bill to bail out the very people who almost brought the economy to catastrophe, they had the balls to say they NEEDED the bonuses to keep the firms from suffering “brain drain”. The idea being that the people on wall street would leave their jobs for greener pastures if no bonuses were paid out.

Seriously? I said name that tune! There would be little to no brain drain, because there was and is no place these people could go to make the kind of money and bonuses they make on wall street. We’ll never know, however, because the big bonuses were paid out.

[/slight hijack]

33

Those two things are not mutually exclusive. 54 year old guy gets laid off, wants a new job, looks around for a year or two before giving up and deciding to live on unemployment/welfare/wife’s salary until social security or his pension kicks in. aka my brother.

34

Some months after I lost my old job, I applied for (and, to my surprise, got) a job at a call center as temporary Christmas help. I realized almost immediately that the stories I had heard about the place being nothing but a boiler room were correct. I know a lawyer who practices in the small town where the boiler room is located, and she said it’s far worse than I could have figured out in the week that I worked there. Most of the people they hired were the type who didn’t know about little things like labor laws, and I had a heckuva time getting my check.

A few months after that, I got a job at a startup, through a temp agency, in my field, and I figured out VERY quickly that I did not want to sign on as a permanent employee at this place, the main reason being that the regular employees were also having a lot of difficulty getting paid. There was one technician who had worked there for a month and had yet to see a penny (they were supposed to be paid weekly) and simply didn’t show up one morning. Not the way to do it, but we understood. IDK if he ever got paid at all.

The following year, one of the technicians I had worked with lost her job too, and I told her not to work at that call center. She’d already been told that more than once. :frowning:

35

In a country of over 300 million people you find it hard to believe that a few thousand have given up on work??? :confused: Now, if you want to say there are millions, then THAT might be a bit hard to swallow without some cites, but thousands?

36

I don’t get how “giving up” works. How do you pay your bills? If you’re making more on unemployment than you could at any job that would hire you, how long will that last? Can you get unemployment benefits for years? I had no idea. And if giving up means -Oh heck, I guess I’ll just live off my savings for the rest of my life- then that’s actually called retirement and good for you but stop pretending it’s a bummer because isn’t that what we’re all working toward anyway?

I hear a lot about people dumbing down their resumes or saying 50 is too old to even get an interview, but I’ve also heard that once you’ve been out of work for a year you’re unlikely to ever get back into the groove of a full time job even if someone would give you one. So I wonder how often it’s age or being overqualified that keeps them from offering an interview and how often it’s more about ah geez, look at the huge gap in this guy’s resume, it’ll probably take him four days just to figure out what to wear to an interview, no thanks.

I worked in Silicon Valley at a great org that was run by smart, hard working people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s AND 60s. When I left that job it took me four months to find another run by more smart, hardworking people in a wide range of ages. No one I’ve met has been thinking anyone is too old for an interview.

It was nervewracking to be unemployed, but I can’t even imagine it taking years to find another job. How is that even possible? I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, I’m just saying I do not understand how it happens.

37

Unemployment doesn’t last forever. I suppose those people live with family or off their spouses income or go on welfare. I honestly don’t know how someone can just “give up” working.

If you worked in Silicon Valley then you are probably pretty smart, skilled and educated. You are working in a part of the country that is experiencing economic growth in a field that is in demand. You are in an area where there are lots of employers and a vast professional network. My experience is similar, just in NYC. I’ve been laid off several times as well since 2008, as have several of my friends and colleagues in their 30s, 40s and 50s. All of us have managed to find equivalent jobs within 3-6 months. Each time, I’ve had multiple six-figure offers.

The people who I imagine have a much harder time are the ones I see working at my clients. These are people who manage and maintain some legacy system or app in some back office. Maybe they’ve been doing it for 5-10 years, often in some smallish suburban town where they are one of the few employers in the local office park. There is a good chance they will be rendered obsolete by the system or process my employer is putting into place. They may have “mad skilz” in their little world, but they typically lack education, skills, or ambition to go be Deloitte or Accenture consultants or work in a startup. So I’m not really sure what they do.

38

So you’ve said, several times.

I am glad that in your corner of the world all workers continually educate themselves and keep their career parachute handy and in good condition. I assure you that for every person who is ready, willing and able to jump when needed, there are some multiple who are comfortably ensconced in their job and not preparing for any big change - so when that change happens, they have few options, and one of them is to find another way to subsist without employment.

That you cannot imagine how people can “stop working” makes me wonder about the breadth of your experience, though. While discouraged dropouts may be more prevalent at one time than another, and we most certainly have gone through a high tide of such cases, they are not so rare in any era that you should be completely unaware of their existence.

39

Often they stay in the same place, now managing and maintaining the New Snazzy Program.

40

A great deal of it is geographical. If you own a house, especially a house that is paid for, and your spouse has a job that covers expenses, you are pretty stuck. To move, you have to find a new job good enough to justify 1) whatever haircut you will take on the house and 2) the loss of your spouse’s income for some period of time. In very depressed areas, the loss on the house may be close to total, so basically you will have to get a job somewhere else where what your new salary is = spouses old salary + new housing costs just to break even. If you are 30, that might be worth it. But if you are 60? Probably not.