Posted on 09/28/2010 12:26:17 AM PDT by 49parallel
"Patricia Reid is not in her 70s, an age when many Americans continue to work. She is not even in her 60s. She is just 57.But four years after losing her job she cannot, in her darkest moments, escape a nagging thought: she may never work again.
College educated, with a degree in business administration, she is experienced, having worked for two decades as an internal auditor and analyst at Boeing before losing that job.
But that does not seem to matter, not for her and not for a growing number of people in their 50s and 60s who desperately want or need to work to pay for retirement and who are starting to worry that they may be discarded from the work force — forever."...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This is also an interesting story...
THE NEW POOR- After Training, Still Scrambling for Employment By PETER S. GOODMAN Published: July 18, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/business/19training.html?ref=the_new_poor
Read the two articles and you'll note that current gov't efforts seem to be abandoning potentially productive, but older assets thinking that preparing the next generation is good enough.
Letting assets waste away wouldn't be an intelligent way to run a business - I'm not sure if it's an intelligent way to run a country either.
If she’s from New York, she probably voted Obama.
And next election, she’ll probably do so again.
.....NYT, TAKING A LOOK AROUND THEIR press room, with circulation dropping and people who worked for them looking for work where they are not needed....hmmm
..”OK, I got it, let’s make it a story about the average American worker, this way they will understand what were going through........we gotta spin this”
It’s easy for me to say, but just to put it out there:
if you can’t find a job, make one.
Perhaps it is impossible. But perhaps not. Employ yourself, if you possibly can. The hours may be lousy and the pay may start low, but perhaps you can work.
I read an article that this applies mostly to white males over 50. First, the article flatly stated that that particular group is computer-illiterate, and is impossible to educate. Second, the other groups have a prior claim on special consideration in employment.
I guess all the mainframe and server tech support I did for 40+ years never really happened. And I imagined my last review where I got the highest stats for the entire department.
Governments (and companies for that matter) often promote training, or re-training, as a panacea for all unemployment. But it doesn’t matter how much or how hard you retrain, or how much personal effort and money you put into it, if there aren’t any jobs there at the end of it.
It also shows that racial profiling is perfectly acceptable, if its the "right group" that is being profiled. /s
We covered this story a few days ago.
We decided that a foolish person, whom, upon losing their job, takes out their entire 401 at a huge loss (more than half) and uses it to travel to Turkey and Thailand is not suddenly entitled to whine.
My business dropped off to the point that I had to go job hunting for the first time in 27 years. I had to go online to refresh my memory on how to put together a resume.
On Tuesday I sent out my resume PDF.
On Wednesday I got a phone call from an employer.
On Thursday morning I went for my interview.
On Thursday afternoon I had my technical evaluation interview.
On Friday I took my drug test.
On Monday I started working full time.
An now my business has started picking up.
Went over the figures again and it’s not quite half. Just the same, she took her unemployment and and savings and used them to go abroad to a place I never considered going because I CANT AFFORD TO.
Plus, she’s got a paid off house. What’s killing her? Taxes. I never have much sympathy for libs who complain because they reason they can’t live is they have voted in a bloated government that taxes them to death.
The same thing happened to me. I left, at a loss, to go somewhere which has no income tax and my house tax was 1/10 the amount. For what she took out of her 401 K and traveled the world, she could have lived the full ten years till SS and pulled the full amount (one of the things she is complaining about).
And she probably NEVER WILL work again. That act protecting people over 40 from job discrimination in favor of younger people is a real buzzkill for business. Consider hiring older people, and visions of lawsuits will be dancing in your head.
And besides, that over-40 act is embarrassing. Is 43 (my age) really that old???
And besides, if I understand correctly, the business cannot ask the job-seeker his age, BUT the business can always deduce the age from the birth date on the application form, and knock the prospective hire out accordingly. Believe me, I know, my father suffered from age discrimination trying to get back in the job market after his time in Europe. Fortunately, he found a job as a realtor, and was working as such until the early 2000s.
by her own description she has showed terrible financial judgment since losing her job, just awful....
she had the resources already in her grasp (401K, house etc.) to live decently with her husband for the rest of their days — instead of down-sizing her appetites and lifestyle in the downturn, she has squandered her retirement savings and now she’s whining about her own mess!
“if you can’t find a job, make one.”
I’ve been self employed for 23 years. My wife just started her own business.
But it’s a tough go in the Obama economy. I know I’ll get a full paycheck this week and the middle of the month. Beyond that, cash flow is king. Some of our licensees are having trouble. So far never enough at once to shut us down. Wife’s business is picking up more slowly than we projected.
I’m 59 and it’s would be a tough age to start over.
I've thought about going back to fulltime work, but I would need to move closer to a city to do that... which means I would need to sell my house... which of course is worth much less than 5 years ago when I bought it (fortunately I paid cash for it, so that's a blessing).
It depends entirely on who that asset is likely to vote for. Our new fascist/communist government wants to get rid of all those pesky "conservative" people, and they tend to be older and more experienced than the younger, more malleable folks.
That's such BS. IIRC, My Dad was already over 50 when he built his computer from components he ordered on e-Bay.
You got it. I am trying to think up something new right now. Everywhere I turn is a government stone wall. But there has to be a crack somewhere. This economy is stone cold dead. The Black market may boom soon.
That is basically where I am right now.
I have pretty much come to the conclusion, after searching for a year, that I will not be hired for an in-house editorial position again, so I am taking my copy-editing/rewriting business freelance and have begun working to build my own customer base.
It’s slow going, the money is not steady, but there is no commute and nobody cares if I FReep between jobs.
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