Sir, you are mistaken. I find that many people like you, who have a job, have some contempt for the long-term unemployed. You are convinced that if you lost your job, your own sterling job history and determination to get hired again would keep you from remaining jobless for very long. That may have been true in the past, but it’s no longer the case.
Let me tell you about a situation with which I’m familiar. My firm lost a major contract and began laying people off about a year and a half ago. All in all, several hundred were laid off in our town and surrounds, and hundreds more were laid off in other cities. Most of us have an excellent work history, useful skills, and a great work ethic, and we live in an area with relatively low unemployment compared to the rest of the US because of the presence of the federal government, so we all thought we’d be hired again shortly.
Here’s the interesting part: all the younger people (below 40) did get jobs pretty quickly. Of the people over 50, only a few have been hired. Only two of those over 55 have been hired again. Nobody over 60 has gotten a job.
Now, does it seem likely to you that ALL of the middle-aged people at my office were slackers who didn’t try to get job? In fact, we all scrambled and competed. We did everything we were supposed to do to get jobs: kept our skills up to date with courses, networked, volunteered, did social media self-marketing, targeted companies, used online resources, contacts, employment agencies, cold-calling, professional resume re-writing, coaching, classes on interviewing, you name it. But you can’t persuade a hiring manager to hire you if you can’t even get an interview. You can’t waylay him in the parking lot if you can’t get past the security guard at the main gate. Go from door to door on the commercial strip, asking at every business if they’ll hire you or at least look at your resume, and you’ll be laughed at: “Apply online,” they’ll say, or “We don’t do the hiring it, they do it at Corporate,” or “Are you kidding? We just laid off our secretary, and she’d been with us for 12 years,” or “We’re getting ready to go out of business and sell our fixtures, we’re obviously not hiring.”
The sad statistics are that many older workers (by which is meant, anybody over 50) may never be hired again no matter how fabulous their job skills. We are probably just going to have to figure out some home business to run.
By the way, my lovely 23-year-old daughter graduated from college this spring and had a job lined up back in February. She had been working summers for the same company and they were so delighted with her that they wanted her to work for them year-round. But in early August she was told they were out of money and couldn’t keep her around after Labor Day. She started sending out resumes a month ago, had two interviews, got hired, and started work at a very good new position this past week, even though the usual wisdom is that her degree area isn’t good for getting a job. Her competition was a woman in her late forties and a woman in her early thirties, both of whom had far more accomplishments and much better resumes than my daughter has. You tell me: you think there may be some age discrimination going on that benefited my gorgeous, cute, but inexperienced daughter?
Anyway, your basic premise is flawed. Even if half of the 15 million people out of work are slackers, even if as much as 66% of them aren’t trying hard to get work, the fact is that there are still going to be five million people who aren’t slackers and really are knocking themselves out to get one million available jobs. FIVE MILLION! I’m sorry, trying hard may not cut it for the older worker. -You- may “not know anybody who is willing to work hard and smart that stays unemployed for any length of time,” but I do. I know hundreds.