Posted on 02/22/2014 11:18:24 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
On Dec. 28, 1.3 million Americans lost their unemployment insurance when an emergency federal unemployment insurance program expired. Critics of extended unemployment benefits say the benefits raise jobless numbers by allowing people to stay unemployed longer instead of taking an available job. But people like Trista Selmar-Steed, a 38-year-old former medical biller who lost her job in 2012, say the benefits have kept her family above water while she looks for work. Special correspondent John Carlos Frey reports from Georgia.
TRANSCRIPT
TRISTA SELMAR-STEED: I open it up and just rip it down the middle. Separate it.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Trista Selmar-Steed cuts a lot of coupons these days… In fact she’s becomes a bit of a fanatic about it.
TRISTA SELMAR-STEED: This is my coupon box, container, I carry it with me to the grocery store. Coffee, cake, butter, milk, pasta, sugar — this one here is for household goods and personal items.
TRISTA SELMAR-STEED: You never know that coupons will save you as much money as you– it actually has.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: The 38-year-old who lives in a suburb just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, has been saving all these coupons because as of December 28th, she has no income. She was one of 1.3 million Americans who lost their unemployment insurance when an emergency federal unemployment insurance program expired.
TRISTA SELMAR-STEED: That same week that I expected to get that next check was the same week that I had a bill that was due — but I wasn’t able to pay it. I had to ask my husband to start paying my part of the bills and that’s the sad part, not being able to help my husband pay– pay the bills.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Trista, who used to make $30,000 a year working for a medical billing service, was laid off from her job in November of 2012, and hasn’t been able to find a job since.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: I sensed a year out there in this job market has kind of beat you up a little bit, yeah?
TRISTA SELMAR-STEED: It’s very sad that– to have the qualifications and not be able to actually work, you know, get a job in your field. And I’ve been doing this 2007.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Why do you think it’s so hard for you to get a job?
TRISTA SELMAR-STEED: I’m not sure. A lot of companies are still laying off.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Trista has now been without her benefits for 8 weeks. To make matters worse, her husband who is a truck driver was hurt on the job and is now on what’s known as light duty, working fewer hours and only taking home about 60% of what he used to which now equals about $2000 a month.
TRISTA SELMAR-STEED: So that’s another whammy, you know, something else that started– started the down spiral, excuse me.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: They say they now have to dip into their savings just too pay their bills. She says things have gotten so bad, that when she’s not at her computer for several hours each day looking for work, she’s and her husband spend their free time watching TV just to lift their spirits.
TRISTA SELMAR-STEED: Cartoons and comedy, it have us laughing. It takes your mind off of the things that you might be going through.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: There’s some people who would say that people who are on unemployment don’t want to look for a job. They just want to live off the unemployment. It’s– it’s a free easy paycheck.
TRISTA SELMAR-STEED: It’s not a free easy paycheck. That’s what– for me, it’s not. I know what I like in life. I know what I strive to have in the future. And I can say some people might try to use that, but me personally, I– that’s not me.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: While Trista believes that extending her benefits would give her the cushion she needs to get another job, Economics Professor Jeff Dorfman, who teaches at the University of Georgia, says that the extended unemployment benefits ARE the problem.
JEFF DORFMAN: The studies show it raises unemployment more by allowing people to stay unemployed longer, still searching for a really great job instead of taking a job that’s available.
Dorfman points to North Carolina. Last July the state legislature cut unemployment benefits from 73 weeks to 19 weeks. In the months since the state unemployment rate dropped from 8.9 percent to 6.9 percent.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: And you attribute that to cutting 50 weeks of unemployment insurance.
JEFF DORFMAN: When you suddenly get cut off, you realize, “You know, I need to take a job.” And people in North Carolina apparently found jobs.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Others attribute the decline in unemployment there to unemployed workers giving up their search for work. And they note the drop in unemployment has been coupled with a big increase in the number of people there on food stamps.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: As for Trista, she says she’d be happy to take a job outside her medical billing field. She says she’s applied for all kinds of jobs during the past year, everything from driving a school bus or a truck to clerical jobs at CVS and Wal-Mart. Even as a flight attendant with Delta. All of them met with rejection.
TRISTA SELMAR-STEED: We regret to inform you that you have not been selected for this position at this time. Thank you for applying and best wishes for success in your future endeavors. Delta talent acquisition team. And I’ve gotten that three times from Delta, so…
TRACY MOSLEY: You hear the– the theory that some people are just a couple paychecks away from homelessness. Well, we actually see that.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Tracy Mosley is the Transition Program Coordinator for the Urban League of Greater Atlanta, an organization that helps African Americans find and train for jobs. He warns of dire consequences unless unemployment benefits are extended.
TRACY MOSLEY: We actually see people that– had a sustainable income, that had a good job, good employment. But all of a sudden they find themself homeless.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: The problem is particularly acute in the African American community where the unemployment rate is nearly double the national average. Mosley says the interview and job prep classes his organization offers have been filled to capacity with people like Trista Selmar-Steed, who he says are desperate for work. She recently met with a job counselor here.
COUNSELOR: so you are being recommended for a position with MARTA, which is the transit authority for Atlanta, that our bus railway system that we use here. That’s one of the opportunities you’ll be considered for. So I wanna make sure that you are going to be available on March the 3rd so I can have you lined up for an interview.
TRISTA SELMAR-STEED: Ok, well thank you so much, I really appreciate this, this is a big help.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Trista is crossing her fingers that this lead might just pan out… but for the time being just getting to the Urban League’s office in Atlanta, a 45 minute drive from her home in the suburbs is a financial burden now that she doesn’t have an unemployment check every week.
TRACY MOSLEY: And so if their source of income, of temporary income, is cut off — A lot of them cannot even afford to come down here for their training.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: But Professor Jeff Dorfman says that government benefits can’t go on forever.
JEFF DORFMAN: Our compassion has never been unlimited in this sense. We always eventually cut people off. We already had some mechanism for deciding at some point we’ve gotta stop paying for you.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: And some would argue that we’re not there yet. We’re not at that point in the recovery where we should start cutting back. We still need to fund for an extended period of time.
JEFF DORFMAN: The longest we’ve ever kept benefits before is 35 months after the end of a recession. And we’re at 55 months now. So we’re 20 months, that’s over a year and a half longer than we’ve ever provided these extended benefits for.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Dorfman believes that if the government is going to intervene, that money could be better used retraining the unemployed for new jobs. For now, with Congress at an impasse, it looks like Trista, and nearly two million others, will have to survive without the federal life line they’ve come to count on in these hard times..
TRISTA SELMAR-STEED: I mean, it dampens your spirit a little bit, but the only way you can prosper, I’ve learned, is to keep a high spirit // And so I just look at it as where one door closes, someone will eventually hire me.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: After a year, you still feel that way?
TRISTA SELMAR-STEED: I still feel that way. Yes.
“If you include in your resume that you spent three years in prison for car theft and assaulting a police officer, it will increase your chances for being hired.”
Really ???
.
Patriot Babe...since you are a renter that gives you more flexibility to move to a better location with more opportunities. If you are a single woman there are older folks looking to offer room and board to help with minor household duties. You really have to think out of the box. The truth is that not many people are actually looking for a “job” they are looking for “money”. Brainstorm ways to make money instead of just getting a job.
As a roughneck, yes. It is a miserable dirty job that only pays well because the hours are long and you get a lot of overtime. They don’t care what your history is as long as you look rough enough to survive in a miserable environment and you don’t really have any other options. They want people who can do the job and won’t complain that it is one of the dirtiest jobs on the planet. It is one job you can get with a criminal record.
Jeez I had that job once too!
I thought it was gonna be so cool working at the Speed Barns LOL
Thanks-—I had to Google “roughneck” because I wasn’t quite sure what they did.
Learn something every day.
.
She may find some ambulance service that might hire her, but I doubt it.
She should go to work at a grocery store starting at the bottom, in a year or two she would probably make the same as she did before and with benefits.
FROM THE MARKET.
She has no one willing to hire her at her old wage, so she is not worth the wage she was getting before more than likely.
For her children she should consider WalMart, McDonalds, Seven Eleven and so forth.
I understand what you are saying and I do tailor my resume to the specific job, research the company, and write a cover letter that expresses my desire to join their exiting world class company.
I do got to companies fave to face, they will ALL tell you to apply online.
Your very best bet is to know some one in the firm that you can get your resume to so as to bypass the gatekeepers.
When applying for a job as a “roughneck” in the oil fields.
He was being sarcastic.
I would suggest that your son join some volunteer organizations in his community. Usually they are filled with older people who love to see a young man with some “snap”. Great way to get out in the community and showcase his work ethic. I would also suggest going on “Meetup.com” and networking with people who share his interests.
Oh they are the worst. Many I got were indeed in my area, but others were just about 9 ballparks away from anything I had ever done or would ever be qualified to do.
I seriously wonder if they are part of the problem with people finding jobs.
At least back in the day, when you were looking at a newspaper you knew that (99.99999% of the time, because I think even then some ads were fake, maybe they were part of some spy code or something, I don’t know) the job was real and it was available. It cost good money to put an ad in the Sunday Times and nobody was doing that as a lark and the ads didn’t stay in for weeks (and months!) on end once the job got filled.
Trista should think about using her knowledge of couponing to start a business. Offer couponing classes or even offer to cut the coupons and organize them for people who are too busy or just want to outsource it to someone with more expertise. Maybe advertise in her community that she would do the grocery shopping for elderly folks who find it hard to get out and shop.
I think everyone in our firm has been hired because they knew someone at the company. If you have a friend at a company you want to work for, send them the resume and have them give it to the person in charge of hiring that position. If you are hired and you work out, there is usually a bonus paid to the employee for the referral. At least that's the way it works at our firm.
Our mail room and file rooms are filled with people who all went to school together or who knew each other before they were hired. Generally we only hire attorneys that someone in the firm knows personally and can vouch for them. Then when that person is hired, the attorney who made the referral gets a big bonus if they are still with the company after 6 months.
The market is basically closed to people who don't know anyone at the job they are applying for. The only exception are those employers who are desperate to find people to work for them and as a general rule, if they are desperate to find employees, it is because they are impossible to work with.
Actually I was being facetious.
But in some professions having spent time in prison is a resume enhancer. These are usually for jobs nobody else would want to do.
I think it is a huge problem.
Everyone I know that has had to use the process has complained about how faceless it is.
Time to rebuild my network.
How many people are looking outside their comfort zone? Just my industry there are LOTS of opportunities for machinists. There are retraining programs even in my little city. It is crappy in Obamaville, I know. But after 99 weeks, come on. There is nothing you could have done after all that time?
I was unemployed for 12 months and not only am I proud of my skills and work ethic but I am already better at my current job in six months than some other people working there for years.
You may wish to revise your theory.
I doubt if things are going to get better in your area. May have to move.
Of course that's a bit difficult with no money or contacts.
Good luck. We'll keep you in our prayers.
You have my sympathies. You might want to read the askamanager blog for her advice on resumes, cover letters, etc.
You could make your own work. Create crafts and get a booth at your local craft fair. Or plant a garden and sell produce at the farmer’s market. Have yard sales — they are a lot of work, but you can make money (you go to yard sales of people who are just unloading stuff, buy them out, and then work at making presentable items which you sell at a higher price and wait for the right buyer).
You could also put flyers in the doors in your neighborhood offering to do cleaning and other services. Unfortunately, some things you might run afoul of government regulations, like you can’t just offer to drive old people to the grocery store because of the “taxi” rules.
I do understand — the easiest thing to do is to find someone else who did the hard work of figuring out how to sell a product or provide a service, and then hitch your wagon to theirs by taking a job with their company. But that isn’t the only way to earn a living, especially not in the internet era, where millions of people have full-time jobs selling items on e-bay and Craig’s list.
My son made $400 acting in a commercial once. And me and my two kids make almost $1000 a year each working weekends in October as haunt monsters at the local theme park. I do that while working a full-time job.
And for 8 years, I made $30 a week writing a column for the local newspaper. If you have a local paper, submit some editorial/opinion columns and see if you can get picked up.
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