More than a few of the people who are losing their well-paid jobs are either middle-aged and starting to develop the health problems that people get when they get older.
Assuming that they managed to stash away enough money that they can go to school again for 2-4 years to learn a new occupation, they will now be going out to compete with people in their twenties. Now, you’re a hiring manager. Are you going to hire the younger and more likely healthier worker, or are you going to hire the older guy who may have arteries that are starting to harden, and who probably start costing the company’s insurance plan more money sooner than the just-out-of-college kid? Is a thirty-something manager with an ego going to want a worker with life experience and (hopefully) some of the wisdom and/or street smarts that go with it, or the young kid who is more likely to think that managers actually know what the hell their doing and will be eager to please.
Also, since most folks don’t have the financial reserves to get a degree without working, and most states won’t pay unemployment benefits to students, because God forbid a person should get an education so they can become gainfully employed when there are McJobs available, they will find themselves trying to work at a McJob while going to school. Since older folks don’t have the staminal of people in their teens and twenties, they may find that trying to work full-time and go to school is more than their aging bodies can handle, and since they can’t afford to cut back to part-time, what with having to pay the rent and all, it will probably be school that goes out the window.
It really isn’t so simple as “just learn a new skill when the job your boss assured you was secure last Wednesday at the meeting is shipped to India”. It’s a very rare occupation in the modern world that is learned on an apprenticeship basis. Most employers won’t train people in a job anymore- they want a college degree/certificate from a vo-tech school that says you can hit the ground running.
I certainly agree that it would be very, very nice to see underemployment statistics, especially at the same intervals and timeliness as the other employment measures. Unfortunately, so far no one that I’m aware of has come up with a definition of underemployment that is anywhere nearly as effective as how we define unemployment. The thing is, the way the Labor Department defines unemployment, there is precisely zero ambiguity as to who is employed, who isn’t, and who isn’t in the labor force. The BLS can send out questionaires or conduct phone surveys where they ask a list of questions, and if the respondent answers each one truthfully then there is absolutely no question which category they fall into. With underemployment, I think you would have to individually look at each case and determine who is and isn’t underemployed subjectively. Not only could this possibly lead to cases where a person is or isn’t underemployed based on who analyzes their case, but it would be tremendously costly as compared with the current survey techniques.
Some state governments have conducted their own underemployment surveys, actually. I think the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission did one in the late 1990s or so. Unfortunately, due to their prohibitive cost, no state of which I’m aware performs them at monthly, or even quarterly, intervals.
In regards to discouraged workers, they are currently counted by the BLS as those “marginally attached to the labor force.” This data is available monthly with the rest of the employment figures, although the media typically only looks at the standard, seasonally adjusted definition. I can hardly fault the BLS for collecting and providing data that the popular press ignores. In any event, these numbers would only be significant so far as they vary in proportion to the regular unemployed persons, since we’ve been using that definition for as long as we’ve tracked unemployment. It would be one thing if we used to do it one way, then switched to not including the discouraged, and then compared current numbers to numbers calculated under the old system. But as long as the comparison is apples to apples and there are no hugely significant changes in the ratio of discouraged to unemployed workers, I really don’t see what the problem is, particularly since the BLS provides the data anyway. If the problem is that the standard definition does not accurately portray the picture of American unemployment, I would be far more concerned that pretty much all of the data reported by the media is seasonally adjusted, rather than actual.
Who(what company) wants to hire a 50 or 60 year old “trainee”, even if he/she did go back to school and learn a new trade.
Furthermore, just exactly what jobs are actually available for someone to get retrained for?
There are millions who got laid off due to outsourcing. Where are the millions of jobs out there waiting for someone to be retrained for? Which companies, names and locations please, who have 3 million openings?
After you graduate, you will find that the computer programming that you learned, or the engineering, or radiology, or whatever is also being outsourced to asia.
If a 50 layed off american worker goes back to school, not only is he still unemployed when he graduates, but he also now has a federal education loan in addition to pay for.
Walmart is going to install self-checkouts at their stores, so they will be laying off hundreds of thousands of cashiers in the future - not hiring.
Starting a business with the last of your retirement savings is riskier than going to Las Vegas. Most small businesses fail within the first 5 years.
Social security doesnt kick in until you are 67 years old. just what do you do when you get laid off.